


then the bomb

by all_these_ghosts



Series: then the bomb [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Colonization, F/M, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Colonization (X-Files)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 14:50:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 32,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11648841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: "Do you ever worry about the end of the world, Scully?""Yes," she said. "But I don't think it's going to happen fast."She would remember that, later.





	1. before

**Author's Note:**

> You can read this story in its original format [here](http://all-these-ghosts.tumblr.com/tagged/then-the-bomb/chrono).

One night, when they were young, she fell asleep sprawled across the full-size bed in his motel room. The scratchy bedspread reeked of cigarette smoke and her dreams were all of the Cancer Man and long dark hallways, empty rooms.

In the middle of the night she stirred to the sound of a creature howling outside and underneath, the click-clack of a furious keyboard. She blinked herself awake to see Mulder still sitting on the armchair, face lit by the bluish glow of his laptop.

She said, “You’re still up?”

His face was troubled. He lowered the screen to look at her. “Do you ever worry about the end of the world, Scully?”

She considered it. She wouldn’t have, six years ago, but a lot of things had changed since then. “Yes,” she said, finally. “But I don’t think it’s going to happen fast.”

He nodded.

She would remember that, later.


	2. before

_and I’d seen all the warning signs_  
_on the TV, in the Times_  
_but I had you to hold at night_  
_and so it took me by surprise_

–Quiet Hollers, [“Mont Blanc”](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fquiethollers.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fmont-blanc&t=YmI2NzRlM2MwYWJlMTI2NDRiZDg5NWM4ZWJkNjRlMjlkNTAwZDMwOSxUcjlEdjduZw%3D%3D&b=t%3AbkEJOfCBPwl9RzxGvC2jjQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fall-these-ghosts.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F156544823101%2Finterlude&m=1) 

* * *

I.

“You can’t be serious,” Will said. His shoes crunched on the gravel. “This driveway is like, five miles long.”

Scully just shook her head and smiled. “Plenty of room for a basketball hoop.”

“You can’t play basketball on _gravel_ , Mom.”

Mulder and Scully exchanged glances, trying to hide their matching smirks. He teased, “I think you’re getting spoiled, Will. When I was your age, we were lucky to play on gravel.”

Will rolled his eyes. “Is there even a school out here?”

“You’re not getting out of school, Will,” Scully said. “We’re only a ten-minute drive from the center of town. When you get to high school it’ll be a little further, but there’s a bus, and if you ask nicely Dad will probably drive you.”

“Oh my _God_.” There was, of course, nothing more humiliating to a teenaged boy than getting dropped off at school by his parents. In the District he’d been able to walk - at first with one of his parents, and the last few years with other boys in their building who attended the same school.

“Come on, kid,” Mulder said, ruffling his son’s hair. “It’s an adventure.”

* * *

II.

Scully loved the little house. A few acres of land, a hundred feet of frontage on a perfectly round, quiet lake. On the first weekend she and Mulder set up a hammock between two trees, just a few feet from the water’s edge. It was a cicada year, and on humid summer afternoons she fell asleep to the sound of their singing.

At sunset she’d sit out on the dock with a glass of wine, letting her feet dip into the water. Mulder would watch her from the screened back porch, his laptop resting on a wicker table the home’s previous owners had left behind. He’d write a few thousand words about the monsters in their past, then join her outside in the peaceful present.

Neither of them ever expected their lives to look like this. So quiet, so calm. It had been so many years since they’d lived in the summer air, tasting the water and the sunlight and all of the green things of the world.

* * *

III.

The house was drafty and old. Most of its previous owners had used it as a summer home, so Mulder spent that first fall learning all about insulation while Scully brought home the bacon.

He was a little bit glad. He wouldn’t want things to get too traditional.

Will helped, too, when his mood wasn’t too surly. This happened less and less frequently as the months wore on.

“I don’t understand why we had to move out here,” Will would say, his voice thick and bitter. “I don’t know anybody out here. Neither do you.”

“Are we bad parents?” he mused one night, tucked into bed next to Scully. “Or is he a bad kid?”

She’d sighed and put her book down, pinched the bridge of her nose. “Neither, Mulder. He’s just twelve. It’s a tough age. You remember being twelve.”

“I don’t think my experience of twelve was typical,” he said grimly.

And then she pulled him into her arms, and he breathed her in and wished he could go back in time, wished he could tell his twelve-year-old self, so alone and afraid, that he would never find his sister, but that he would find other things that made the world worth living in.

* * *

 

IV.

As the years went on, Will made friends who lived an easy bike ride away. Mulder and Scully went to his basketball games and cheered him on. He got taller every damn day, until Mulder realized that his son was definitely going to outgrow him.

In the backyard they had a garden. Scully grew roses. Every year Mulder planted rows of vegetables, lettuce and carrots and bell peppers, and every year a few more of them survived. They never got another dog, but they did buy a new fish tank. Will named the fish after his favorite basketball players. He said goodbye to Lebron - the heartiest, longest-lived fish in the tank - every morning when he left for school, even now that he was fifteen.

The newspapers piled up, unread. Mulder went from checking his email every few hours to checking it every few days, and then hardly at all. When Will turned on the TV at night to watch whichever sport was in season, they’d catch the tail end of the evening news. The outside world only entered their home a few words at a time.

_cruel and illegal order_  
chaos, heartbreak, and resistance  
unprecedented radical change  
sparks confusion and despair  
global backlash grows

Every night Mulder and Scully got in bed at the same time. He went to bed early now; the darkness had lost its appeal. In the glow of their bedside lamps they read and talked until, inevitably, Scully passed out mid-sentence. And then he would put her book away, tuck the blankets around her shoulders, and turn out the light.

The darkness didn’t appeal, and it didn’t scare him, either.

* * *

 

V.

On the Fourth of July, their next-door neighbor cooked up enough hot dogs and hamburgers to feed a hundred people; Mulder personally ate enough for five. Once it was full dark they all retreated to their own yards to shoot off fireworks from the dock. This, every year, was Frohike’s job; he was that perfect (and rare) mix of detail-oriented and reckless.

Some of Scully’s doctor friends were there. One of them asked about Mulder’s book, if it was really nonfiction, and he could feel Scully’s eyes on him from across the room so he just shrugged and said, “The world is a big place.” The woman patted him on the back and said, “Sure is,” then moved on to join a more interesting conversation.

Will had invited a couple friends to stay the night. They’d spent all day out on a neighbor’s pontoon, and Mulder was reasonably confident that they would stay up all night drinking pilfered beer, but that’s what sixteen-year-olds were supposed to do. Will’s cousin and sometime-best-friend Matthew was spending the summer with them too, to Bill’s discontent. The kid had declined to get a summer job yet again. Mulder loved how much it infuriated Bill, and Matthew was surprisingly good company, considering his parents.

The boys retreated to the basement. Mulder relaxed into a lawn chair, his own beer in hand.

The fireworks went late into the night. Through all of the dust, you couldn’t even see the stars.

 


	3. day zero

_**DISPATCH** _

[…] _followed by, at 07:00 EDT, coordinated attacks designed to inflict maximum casualties in 30 major U.S. cities. The President has declared martial law and is expected to give a press conference in the next hour. All flights to or from the United States have been suspended. Citizens are advised to shelter in place pending further information_ […]

* * *

 

Mulder is out early, going for a run around the lake. This is his routine, even in winter, even in the rain. He used to meet the dawn after staying up the night before, and now he wakes to see it. His life has been mundane for years — not that he’s complaining — but he still likes playing at the edges; the liminal moments from starset to sunrise still feel like a time when anything is possible.

He veers off the lake path and up the hill road just to the west. The incline is good for him.

At the top of the hill he pauses to catch his breath, hands on his hips. He pulls the hem of his t-shirt up to wipe the sweat from his forehead. It’s going to be a hot one - that’s what the weather lady said last night. Mulder wonders what ever happened to that rain guy out in Kansas. Maybe he could call in a favor.

The air is thick, more than usual, and there’s a strange scent to it. Not the usual late-summer clash of green things growing and dying, the grass and the rot and the rain.

Oh, but the rot is still there.

And smoke.

And on the horizon—

* * *

 

Adrenaline makes him faster than he’s been in years.

Mulder shakes Will awake. He winces and rolls over, rubbing his eyes. “Dad? What's—”

“Will,” he says, surprised by how calm he sounds, “I need you to get up now. Then I need you to turn off the lights and close the curtains and make sure the doors and windows are locked. Then go down to the basement. Can you do that for me?”

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Will is sixteen and nearly grown, but not right now. Will doesn’t hesitate or ask any questions, just nods and gets out of bed. He pulls the curtains shut on his bedroom window then shuffles down the hall without looking back.

Mulder goes back downstairs, trying to will his hand to stop shaking as he dials Scully’s cell phone. “Pick up, pick up,” he says, his own voice strange in his ears. “Scully.”

No answer.

When he calls the hospital, all he gets is a dial tone.

His laptop is open on the kitchen counter, waiting for him. _The wi-fi is always bad out here_ , he tells himself as he opens up Chrome. But Google still comes up, reliable as ever.

From the living room Will says, “There are servers all over the world.” His voice is flat. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Mulder turns. “Will—”

“Mom’s not coming home, is she?”

“I—”

“I felt it. Whatever happened, I—” Will runs his fingers through his hair. He’s bouncing on his toes now, the agitation coming off him in waves. “It’s like — you know, Obi-Wan — I felt a disturbance in the Force. I know that sounds crazy, I know that, but I—”

“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Mulder says quietly. And he knows from crazy.

Will nods. Slow. “You have to look. Not knowing won’t help anything.”

The front page of the Washington Post is gone, replaced with a white screen and a single paragraph of text.

_…maximum casualties in thirty U.S. cities…_

He thinks he says her name.

* * *

 

They bring everything they need down to the basement. The emergency kit that Scully always insisted they keep ready. The hand-crank radio, gallons of water, canned food, blankets. They drag the mattresses downstairs. Scully’s photo album. Mulder rummages through their bedrooms and stuffs some clothes and books into a duffel bag just in case they need to run, just in case there’s still anywhere to run to.

He puts Scully’s clothes in the bag too. There’s nowhere he’ll run without her.

He takes his gun and makes sure it’s loaded.

And then there’s nothing left to do but wait.

Will curls up in an ugly old armchair and Mulder sits on the couch, head in his hands, trying to ignore the gnawing fear.

“The electricity is still working,” Will says. “That’s a good sign, right?”

On the coffee table the radio plays static on every frequency. Some time between when they looked at the Post and when they finished bringing everything into the basement, the internet stopped working. Their phones are plugged in but the cell towers are down too, or maybe just busy. He hopes they’re just busy.

Will rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, then glares at the radio like he convince it to relay a message through sheer force of will. “I can’t feel her,” he admits. “Usually I can get…something. But I can’t…”

Imaginary sirens start blaring in Mulder’s head and he thinks, _this is my fucking panic face_ , but he keeps his voice steady. “Will, has that happened to you before?”

He’s only a little relieved when his son nods. “A few times,” Will says. “Sometimes if she’s sleeping. And I think…I think she can block me. Sometimes if she’s at work and something really bad is happening, I think she blocks me.” Will swallows hard. “And I guess something really bad is happening. Dad — isn’t there something we can do?”

It’s hard for Mulder to admit to being helpless. He thinks of himself as a man of action. He remembers — was it so long ago? — charging into the line of fire like he was invincible.

He remembers being invincible.

“There will be,” he says finally. When he looks up at his son it’s the first time he’s really seen him in hours. Will’s eyes are bloodshot, his cheeks blotchy red, his dark hair sticking up in every direction. And the same fierceness in the set of his jaw that Mulder used to see in the mirror every morning. What a strange thing, to have a son nearly grown: for someone to be so like him and so entirely separate. He says, “You can always fight.”

* * *

 

The hours pass in tense silence. The sky outside, just visible through the high basement window, is livid orange until it is suddenly, startlingly black. He looks at his watch. It’s two o'clock in the afternoon.

Mulder practices breathing. _Come home, Scully, come home_ , he repeats. His new mantra.

Eventually Will falls asleep, limbs askew on the too-short couch, and Mulder turns out the light. He’ll regret that, later on. He should have savored the light for as long as it lasted.

He takes his phone and goes upstairs to try to get a signal just one more time. He steps outside, waves his phone around. Takes a picture of the eerie mid-afternoon darkness, broken up by the lamp over the driveway. Last summer he and Will had hooked it up to a sensor, for all the nights Scully worked late and they forgot to turn on the outside lights. He’s never seen it come on during the day before.

There was an eclipse a couple weeks ago; they’d driven down to Tennessee to see it. They shouldn’t have bothered. The eclipse has come to them.

Mulder takes a picture - someone has to record the end of the world. He knows he should turn off the light, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

Away in the darkness, something howls.

Once he’d have chased it down, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other.

This time he goes warily back inside, and closes the door.

* * *

 

_**FOUND** _


	4. day one

It’s almost two in the morning when they hear the lock turn upstairs. Will is immediately awake — says, “Mom?” in a sleepy voice that makes him sound eight years old again.

“Stay here,” Mulder says, and he grabs a flashlight and takes the stairs two at a time, each step creaking under his feet—

And it’s Scully. She’s dusty and tear-streaked and covered in dried blood — _not hers_ , he tells himself, _not hers_ — but she’s here and whole and Mulder hadn’t realized how afraid he’d been until he pulls her into his arms and finally breathes again.

“God,” he says, “Scully…”

And then she’s sobbing and he finds that he’s the only thing holding her up.

There are a thousand question he needs to ask, but he buries them deep and holds her so close that his body shakes with every tremor of hers.

“Will’s downstairs,” he says into her hair, and he feels her nod.

“I don’t want to scare him.” She pulls back enough that he can see her better. She would scare Will, Mulder realizes. There are scrapes on her cheek still slowly oozing blood, and she’s covered in dirt and dust and other things that don’t bear thinking about.

He says, “Is the tap water safe?”

Her breathing evens out, and she goes from desperate to emotionless in a millisecond. The set of her mouth is grim. “It’s well water. Safe as anything.”

That’s not entirely reassuring, but he goes to the kitchen sink anyway, dampens a dish towel. Scully just stands in the doorway staring blankly into the middle distance until he comes back to her. Gently he takes her coat off her shoulders, leaves it in a pile in the corner. “I’m guessing this isn’t going to the dry cleaners,” he says, and Scully doesn’t laugh.

Then he takes the towel and starts to clean her face. “Mulder…” she protests weakly, but after a moment she leans into his touch.

He brushes away the dirt and caked-on grime, then dabs gently around the small cuts on her cheek. Every few minutes he cleans the towel off under the tap, then brings it back to her again until her face, at least, is clean. “You’re okay,” he says quietly, like he’s willing it to be true.

“I should go see him,” Scully says. “Then I’ll deal with…the rest of this.” She motions to her hair and clothes, then heads down to the basement.

He hears Will’s voice, groggy but relieved, and Scully reassuring him. It’s not long before she comes back upstairs.

“He’s asleep,” she says. And as tired as Mulder is, Scully looks like she’s going to pass out standing up.

“Come on.” He takes her hand and leads her upstairs to the bathroom, where he starts the shower running and leaves the lights off. He undresses her, slowly, ruined scrubs and undergarments piling up on the tile floor.

He steps into the shower with her, putting his hands on her shoulders and turning her under the spray. The water is lukewarm - whatever was left in the tank after the electricity went out, he figures. She closes her eyes and the evidence swirls down the drain, the dirt and the blood and a few streaks of mascara that still clung to her eyelashes, even after everything. He works shampoo through her hair, scrubbing her scalp until she sighs.

“You have to turn that light off,” she says quietly. The water rushes over her closed eyelids. “It’s the only light on for miles. I don’t want — it’s not a good idea to advertise that we’re here. You shouldn’t have left it on for me. You didn’t even know—”

He interrupts her. Those aren’t words he is willing to hear. “I knew you were coming home.” Because of course, of course he did; there’s no world without her in it.

Scully is cut and bruised but all of it is minor, surface wounds that will heal in a day or two. All the visible wounds, at least. He’s careful, rinsing the dirt out of one deeper gash on her hip. Scully grits her teeth and never complains, and that might be the one normal thing that’s happened today.

“Is it safe for us to stay here?” he asks, taking one last pass over her forearms before he turns the water off.

In the sudden cold, she wraps her arms around herself and shudders. “It’s not safe anywhere. Mulder, I have to — I have to find my mother. And Matt. I was looking at the e-mail he sent, he should be somewhere in — maybe Missouri — but Bill won’t know where to look for him, and we—”

“Shhh,” Mulder says, because he doesn’t know how to tell her that Bill and her mother are probably dead; that Matthew might be alive but they’ll have no way to find him. Those are problems for tomorrow.

He pulls her to him again and she presses her face against his chest. Water drips from the faucet — another project he thought he’d get around to eventually — and echoes off the tile. “You’re alive,” he says, his voice breaking, and she’s shivering in his arms and when she looks up at him he expects to see some of his own fucking overwhelming gratitude reflected back at him, but her eyes are cold.

She says low, “We might live long enough to regret that.” And it’s the first time Mulder has ever truly believed in prophecy.


	5. after

The end of the world is boring.

Somehow that’s what surprises him the most.


	6. after

“Fifteen years ago I would have been prepared for this,” he says.

They’re sitting at their kitchen table while Will sleeps downstairs. Mulder’s not sure what time it is. They haven’t seen real sunlight in a week; their bodies’ schedules are in disarray. Scully is tapping her fingernails on the table and the noise is making him crazy.

“You wouldn’t have expected this,” she counters. “Even then.”

“No,” he admits, and finally breaks, covering her hands with his own to still them. “This isn’t the apocalypse I expected.”

He’d let himself get complacent. After Will was born, after they quit the X-files for good. They’d closed up that part of their lives as surely as the FBI had shut the door to their basement office. Locked it up and nailed boards across the door, for good measure. And it had seemed — for such a very, very long time — that none of it would ever find them.

On the counter the radio hums. They leave it on at all hours, trawling for a signal. All three of them are developing impressive forearm muscles from the hand crank. Fringe benefits of the end of the world.

Reports are sporadic. For a few hours on the third day the old NPR station kicked in and the three of them listened in rapt silence the entire time. They know now that if Scully had stopped at a different grocery store, one closer to D.C., she wouldn’t have been able to come home. They know that the interstates are closed, that major roads into the cities are blocked off, that the electricity is cutting in and out all over the rest of the country.

They’d had pretty good luck on shortwave, at least until yesterday. Yesterday they’d been listening to a man on a CB describe the scene in Baltimore, the city he’d fled. Flames licking at the waterfront, chaos on the streets, and some strange disease spreading through the neighborhoods, a disease that killed you just as you started to notice the symptoms—

And then, midsentence, the man had started screaming. And then they’d heard a gunshot. And then that frequency went silent.

Nothing new on any frequency since then, either.

“I keep expecting people to show up at our door,” Scully admits, her voice raspy, uneven. “My mom. Matt. Frohike, somebody from work — _anyone_. Mulder, what if—"

“Don’t,” he warns.

She continues anyway, though she has to fight to get the words out. “What if everyone we know is dead?”

He thinks they probably are, but he doesn’t say so.

* * *

 

Scully is a careful accountant. There are meticulous hand-written records of everything they have that might be of use. It’s more than he’d expected, and nowhere near enough.

It helps that they live so far away from everything. At least once every winter there would be a storm that cut them off for a few days, so they always had emergency supplies on hand. Gasoline for the car and their generator, jugs of clean water. Ammunition. And Scully must have thousands of tea light candles. She’d buy them in enormous quantities at Costco or Ikea, and Mulder always laughed at her. “You’re never gonna use all those,” he’d complain, and then she would stick the bags in the pantry. He’s glad for them now.

There are other things like that, too. Scully had grown up a Navy brat and can’t resist a good deal, especially on items in bulk, so their pantry is full of canned beans and vegetables, rice and pasta. And more than a hundred cans of soup: last winter the grocery store had a sale on Progresso soup, a dollar apiece, and Scully had filled the trunk of the car with soup cans. When he’d questioned this, she’d glared at him. “You and Will are always hungry,” she’d said, “and you’re also both lazy,” and there was no arguing with that. In practice, of course, they were often too lazy to heat up soup, so most of it is still in the shed.

He tries to do the math. At three hundred calories per can, three a day on minimum rations, that soup would last them…a couple of weeks? That couldn’t possibly be right.

“I told you we needed an apocalypse plan,” he grumbles, rubbing at his temples.

Scully puts down her pen and looks at him, red-eyed. “Do you really want to say _I told you so_ right now?”

“No,” he admits.

“We have enough to get through the winter, if we’re careful,” she says, “and there’s vegetables in the garden we haven’t pulled up yet. And.” She swallows. “There’s just three of us.” He hears the _unless_ buried underneath. He knows that Scully has started scanning the shortwave bands again, listening to the station that just reads the names of the confirmed dead. Every day she doesn’t hear her mother’s name, she keeps hoping.

But even if Maggie had survived the bombs, the roads were all closed, walls were going up around the cities to contain the contagion, and everyone was on their own.

Scully rubs the cross between her finger and thumb like it’s a good luck charm. Mulder remembers a time when his wishes came true, and wonders what he could have wished for that might have changed this.

* * *

 

_I know I planted those seeds down too deep_   
_they’ll die and never see the sun_   
_my fault for that one_   
_I was a city boy before_   
_no excuses anymore_   
_I’ll try to learn and to keep us fed_   
_shed a tear for the books I should’ve read_

—Quiet Hollers, “Mont Blanc”

* * *

 

On the tenth day they see the sun. Scully wants to take this as evidence of — well, something — wants to write it down or take a picture, but instead she just goes outside and stands in the sudden warmth, unmoving. She supposes she’s gone this long without the sun before — those gloomy Washington winters — but before this, she’d never doubted that it would return. Mulder and Will follow her out, blinking into the brightness.

“Whoa,” says Will.

Everything is covered in fine white ash and the light reflects off every surface, blinding. It looks like the first snowfall. Clean and bright.

She shivers in the heat.

Mulder winds his way to the garden at the side of the house and plucks a leaf of lettuce. He blows on it and some of the ash flies off and settles to the ground.

“Do you think it’s toxic?” Will asks.

To no one’s surprise, Mulder sniffs at it, then sneezes. “Only one way to find out,” he says, and takes a bite.

Scully winces. “ _Mulder_ …”

“It’s fine, Scully. Tastes like charcoal.”

“Oh, good,” she snaps. Typical. He used to do this kind of thing all the time, no matter how many blood-borne pathogen training sessions the Bureau made him attend.

She eyes him warily for the rest of the day, waiting for something to happen. That first day is still vague in her memory, a blur of blood and terror, but there are things she remembers. Open wounds, men hemorrhaging in the street, a woman coughing up an impossible quantity of thick black liquid and then falling into it, and her skin—

Scully blanches. She’d tried to help, of course she had, she’s a doctor and she is not afraid, but everything happened so fast. They were all people who’d escaped the city. She can imagine it: the relief they felt to get out before the barriers went up. The horror when they realized it wouldn’t make any difference.

That night she stays up watching him. In sleep his brow eases; he looks younger, unconcerned. In ten days she has forgotten how to pray, but she has remembered how to keep vigil.

In the morning the sun is gone, and Mulder is still fine. If that’s the trade she’ll take it.

* * *

 

Will and Scully follow him into the garden. The sun is back, and it convinces them that it’s safe to be outside, at least for a while. They make a good team: pulling up the vegetables, rinsing off the ash in the lake. Cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, peppers. They leave the sweet potatoes and onions in the ground for now, if only because it forces them to imagine a future.

It’s strangely silent in the yard. This time of year is always quiet — school starts at the end of August, and most of the houses around the lake are summer homes — but they haven’t heard anyone. Mulder would’ve thought, at least, that people would come here after. Most of the neighbors live in the city, and from the bits and pieces they’ve picked up on the radio, he is certain that it’s safer here than almost anywhere else.

If they’re not here yet, he’s pretty sure they aren’t coming. He doesn’t dwell on why not.

He hasn’t mentioned this to Scully yet, but at some point soon they should go through the neighbor’s houses, scavenge anything of use. If no one else is coming back, there’s no point letting supplies go to waste.

Really, he thinks, they should have done it a week ago.

He’ll wait a few more days.

For dinner they have salad; they eat in silence, listening to the crunch of each slice of cucumber. Most of what they’ve pulled up won’t last, but they’ll eat well for now. A few years ago Scully had checked out a library book on home canning, but of course they never got around to reading it. Considering Scully’s diet is eighty percent vegetables, they’ve never had anything leftover to store.

Will goes out into the fading light to rinse the dishes in the lake. Scully pops a cherry tomato into her mouth and says, “I’ll miss this. In the winter.”

He doesn’t tell her that he isn’t worried about that. He doesn’t really think they’ll make it that long.

The tomatoes are delicious.

* * *

 

They’ve fallen asleep on the couch in the living room. He wakes up to a momentary brightness passing over his eyelids.

It was always dark out here in the woods, even before.

Scully stirs beside him. “Do you see that?” she whispers, her head tilting toward the window.

Together they watch. Two beams of bright white light, arcing across the lake. It could be maglites, maybe, or the headlights of a car.

Maybe.

“Mulder,” she says, but she doesn’t finish the thought.

“It’s not for us, Scully,” he says. “No one is looking for us.” _Not anymore_.

He hopes, he hopes.


	7. after

**_FOUND_ **

* * *

 

For the first time in years, she’s started keeping a journal. She is desperate for some kind of structure, some way to give meaning to what is left of her life. If there is a narrative arc she will find it and force it onto paper, so that someday when someone finds it, they will know she lived with purpose.

That’s the theory, anyway.

The days fold into each other. Hours pass like centuries.

It’s been four weeks. She still catches Mulder glancing at his phone now and again, even now that the screen is permanently black. Old habits.

A few years ago Will had gone through a phase where he read apocalyptic novels obsessively. Stories about lotteries and dead children, murderous governments, mazes, matching gray jumpsuits. He used to recount the plots to her in detail, talking about all of the things he would do, if such a fate befell him.

One evening they’re sitting in the basement — as usual — and Will looks up at her. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” he says.

“Like what?”

He shrugs. “Just…shouldn’t we be doing something? Fighting back?”

They haven’t ventured beyond their property line this whole time. “We don’t know what’s out there.”

“Maybe we should find out. Maybe there are people who need our help.”

Briefly, Scully closes her eyes. Once she wouldn’t have hesitated. She spent years of her life venturing into the unknown. And she still has a gun and she can still run in heels, but there is so much more to lose now.

“Mom,” he says, and his voice catches, “if Matt’s still out there.”

She knows what he’s going to say. She’s been thinking it for weeks.

Later, Scully tears a page from the journal. She records their names, in case.

She remembers the headlights, and does not write where they are going.

* * *

 

In the morning they head west, driving over fallow fields and down unmarked paths, dirt roads. He has a compass. He still doesn’t know the way.

The truck had seemed stupid when he bought it, even though he really did haul things after they moved out into the country. It does not seem stupid anymore.

Aside from the emptiness, the world looks almost normal. “Maybe we should’ve gone out earlier,” he says, chewing on his lip. A month, he thinks. A month that Matthew’s been out here on his own. And what were they so afraid of? This is no post-apocalyptic wilderness. Just abandoned farms and stray dogs, barking.

Scully dismisses him too quickly, so he knows she was thinking the same thing. “We did the right thing,” she says. “We couldn’t know if it was safe.”

“We still don’t know if it’s safe.”

She stares out the window. A dog — some kind of collie, scrawny under its matted fur — sits on its haunches by the side of the road and watches as they pass. “It almost certainly isn’t.”

“Dad?” It’s been silent in the backseat all morning, except for the faint, frustrating sound of Will chewing on his nails. Mulder thought he’d broken that habit years ago. Now Will asks, sounding eight years old again, “We’re gonna find him, right?”

“Of course we are, buddy,” Mulder says, but even as the words leave his mouth he thinks that he shouldn’t make those kinds of promises.

After two hours on increasingly twisty mountain roads they near a crossroads, and from a half mile away Mulder can see people standing around. His hands tighten on the steering wheel. Will leans forward. “What are they—”

Men standing in the road, maybe a dozen of them, all with assault rifles strapped to their backs. More dogs. These much better fed than the mangy collie they’d left behind.

“Just keep driving,” Scully says evenly, ignoring Will’s question.

On instinct Mulder slows down as he approaches the crossroads. The men aren’t getting out of the road. One of them swings his rifle, takes it in his hands. “Scully,” he says.

From the backseat, Will says, his voice high and thin, “What do they want?”

Scully’s face is stone. She says it again. “Keep driving.”

He grits his teeth and accelerates. In an instant the men scatter, and Will turns in his seat to look out the back window. “Dad, they’re aiming,” he says, and just as he finishes speaking they hear the first round go off. Something dings their bumper and he speeds up, dust kicking up behind them. He doesn’t look back until there are miles between them.

There’s a long silence after. Finally Will says, “Is that…is that the kind of stuff you guys did before?”

Scully and Mulder exchange glances. “In the bad old days,” Mulder says, trying for jovial. It would be great if his heart rate returned to normal some time this century.

“Cool.” Will leans back in his seat, and they make eye contact in the rearview mirror. Will is trying to look unfazed. He says, “It’s okay.”

His son is old enough to comfort him, Mulder realizes, and somehow that disturbs him more than the gunshots.

* * *

 

As they drive, they stop at convenience stores and gas stations. Some of them have long since been emptied of anything useful — it’s been a month, after all — but others are untouched, windows and doors intact, dust settling on the cash register. He doesn’t understand this. Where are the owners, the neighbors? Those men back at the crossroads, guarding nothing — why weren’t there armed guards standing in front of all these places?

Each time, he and Scully get out: one of them fills gas cans if the pumps are still operating, the other goes inside to take canned food, cleaning supplies, tools. The first time he feels a weird urge to leave money behind. He even reaches for his wallet.

They pass a veterinary clinic and Scully breaks in through the back window, emerging a few minutes later with a bag overflowing with medicine and bandages. When he rifles through it he recognizes some of the chemical names, but not others. When he holds one vial up with a questioning glance, she just averts her eyes.

The first time Mulder siphons gas from the tank of an abandoned car at the side of the road, Will stares at him, wide-eyed.

“You’re stealing,” he says.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Dad, what if they’re coming back?”

Mulder has looked through the window of the car. He does not want Will to look. He just says, “They won’t.”

* * *

 

It feels like they are the only people left on earth.

Other than the armed men, they don’t see anyone else that first day. By the time they’re too tired to go on, they’ve filled the back of the truck with supplies. The trip will have been worth it even if they don’t find Matt.

We will, he tells himself, but he’s lost enough people to know that sometimes people just stay missing.

He turns off the headlights and drives off the path, a little ways into the forest. His night vision isn’t what it used to be, but the moon is full and bright and they don’t hit anything.

Will is in a sleeping bag in the back seat of the cab, legs curled up to fit. Mulder and Scully sleep in the cargo bed, under the camper top they never used to use. They carve out a space for themselves among the cans of food and gasoline and Scully’s box of medicines he doesn’t want to think about.

Mulder pulls a blanket over them and they wind together, pretending that it’s just about the space they take up and not about how desperate they are for each other’s hands. She whispers his name.

Their breath fogs up the windows. He tries to breathe less.

* * *

 

_**FOUND** _

_**** _

* * *

 

Four days.

They mark off every town on Matt’s map. Over the summer he’d spent a week poring over an outdated road atlas, picking out the most backwater route he could manage and then plugging each little town into his phone. Matt said he’d spent his whole life on the coasts, and he wanted to see what else there was. On the day he’d left, Mulder had hummed that Simon and Garfunkel song and accused his nephew of going out to look for America. Will and Matt had just given him a blank stare. Which, to be fair, was the usual return on Mulder’s jokes these days.

Most of the towns they pass are abandoned, as far as they can tell. Or people are just holed up in their houses, afraid to face the world, like they’d been. Every once in a while they reach a settlement — usually on the outskirts of town, clustered around an old school or a strip mall — where the arrival of their truck is met with wary stares. Scully is always the one who gets out, and sometimes Will. She won’t let Mulder. She says it’s in case they need to make a quick getaway, but he doesn’t buy it for a second.

It’s a funny thing. Mulder has spent twenty-five years watching Scully approach small-town strangers. Their body language was always stiff and defensive at the sight of her tailored suit, her three-inch heels, her badge. He’d had a way of setting people at ease, but Scully was intimidating as shit.

Now, in a brown sweater and blue jeans tucked into old work boots, hair in a loose ponytail, Scully fits right in. The old women — it’s always older people, and that’s a strange thing, too — see her coming and soften, even before she speaks. Each time, she shows them Matthew’s picture and his map, then explains what happened. How they lost him.

Each time, in response, they show her a list. Names of the dead and the missing, and the cause of death, if they know it. Every settlement has one. Usually it’s on scrap paper or in an old notebook, with handwritten copies they give Scully to take to the next town. One cluster of people, living in a one-room public library, just has the list inked onto the wall. She returns from that trip dazed and quiet. After a long time she says, “They’re going to run out of room.” She sounds like she’s choking on it.

Each time, they offer to add Matt’s name to the list. “We don’t know that he’s missing,” Scully says defensively, the first time it happens; the older woman’s mouth droops at the edges as she says, “That’s what missing means, dear.”

At one of the towns, somewhere outside what’s left of Louisville, a woman offers to write their names on a different kind of list. “It’s a list of the looking,” she says, white-haired and bright-eyed. “So folks know they haven’t been forgotten.” She turns the notebook to a mostly empty page. The lists of the dead and missing fill pages and pages in the woman’s neat, tiny handwriting, but this list has maybe a dozen names on it.

Scully adds her name, and Matthew’s.

“If you see him,” she says, and then stops.

The woman glances down at the notebook and nods, firm and hopeful. “We will, Miss Scully. When we see him.”

(Many weeks later, Scully will admit to Mulder that she thinks the woman was an angel. He will not laugh. He will not doubt it, not even for a moment.)

After that stop she comes back to the car. Night’s falling and they’ll stay here, where there are guards posted around the perimeter — something about night raids — though Scully still won’t let Mulder get out of the truck.

She tells him, “We’re not going to find Matthew.”

Mulder knows this, of course.

“But I don’t know —” She glances through the rear window, to where Will is sleeping. “I don’t know how to tell him.”

Before Will was born, Mulder had worried about what he could possibly teach his son. He was obsessive, half-broken; he’d spent most of his adult life self-destructing. But this: this is something he knows well enough to teach, finally, after all these years. How to lose.

Maybe loss is coded into their DNA. Maybe his son will spend his whole life tilting at windmills, imagining the night can be beaten back if you just hit it hard enough.

There are worse things than fighting impossible enemies. If fighting is in their DNA, maybe they’ll survive this.

He says, “I’ll tell him.”

* * *

 

On the way back Will doesn’t speak to them.

When he found out they were turning around he just started yelling. Told them they were giving up, that Matt was out there somewhere and they just needed to keep going.

His mom had given him a sharp look. “When you say that, Will. Do you _know_?”

They stared at each other, unblinking. Will considered lying. He knew that was all it would take. If he said that he _knew_ — that he’d sensed it, that he’d had a dream — his parents would keep looking. They’d always trusted his instincts.

Then he remembered that couple in the car, a few days ago. He remembered what they looked like, what his dad didn’t want him to see. And he couldn’t lie. Couldn’t bring that same fate down on all of them — but his anger wasn’t spent yet, not even close, and so he’d rounded on his father and shot off the one piece of ammunition he had left.

“What if it was _her_?” His voice was barely audible, barely a hiss; he’d meant to yell but found that he couldn’t raise his voice on the words.

His dad recoiled anyway. That topic was forbidden, always; Will knew hardly anything about his dad’s sister except that she’d been lost and never found. And he knew that his dad still blamed himself.

“Don’t,” his mom said, and it was as cold as she had ever sounded.

Will didn’t care. “Why not? It’s the same thing. It’s the _same thing_.”

By the time the last few words were out of his mouth he was almost crying, not from sadness but from anger, and sheer, impossible helplessness. “He’s _alone_ ,” Will said. His voice dropped and the other question slipped out, the one he’d probably meant to ask all along. “What if it was me?”

His dad had turned away, leaning against the truck. His mom just looked at him. She said, “But it’s not you.” Will thought it was the most profane thing he had ever heard.

And he got in the car.

Now he’s silent, because no other form of protest is available to him. He remembers when they were little kids, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, sharing a room. Their parents told them _lights out_ meant no talking, either, so they exchanged notes in the darkness. Will probably still has them somewhere, in one of the boxes he hasn’t unpacked since they left the District four years ago. It was mostly one-upping each other’s fart jokes. Sometimes complaining about Matt’s little sister, or their parents, or school. Nothing serious, nothing important. For years now they’ve done the same thing over text. Matt has probably sent him ten thousand poop emojis. And complaints, and confessions.

Nothing important.

Matt, alone.

Will exhales onto the car window and writes _I’m sorry_ in the fog, then watches the words fade. And then he does it again.

* * *

 

One of the little settlements is gone.

It’s where they’d been planning to stop for the night. When they came through a few days ago, there had been a few dozen people living in a roadside motel, with a generator and running water. Now when they drive up there’s no one on lookout, no children running around the parking lot, no keeper of the list sitting in the front office. The sun is setting, and all of the lights are out.

Will says, “We should keep going.” It’s the first thing he’s said in two days. When Mulder turns to look at him Will is staring resolutely out the window, his jaw clenched.

“Will?” Scully asks.

Will and Scully look at each other.

“Mom,” he says. “It’s bad.”

“Then I should go.”

Mulder looks back and forth between them, acutely aware that a conversation is happening and he isn’t part of it.

The box full of medicine is in the back seat with Will, and he passes it up between the seats. Scully opens it and takes out a syringe and one of the vials. She slides the handgun into her back pocket. "Five minutes,” she says, and slams the car door shut behind her.

Once she’s gone, time finally slows down to its normal pace. He feels blindsided.

“Will,” Mulder says, fighting to keep his voice even, “I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror. Will bites his lip. “She can help.”

“I don’t even know what you’re _talking_ about.”

Will closes his eyes and Mulder suppresses a shudder. It’s been years since Will did this kind of thing and it still spooks him. “The raids,” Will says, his voice a low monotone. “Last night. They picked off the guards first, outside. They took almost everyone but they left her — the woman with the list. They left her by herself.” His throat works. “She’s in a lot of pain.”

Mulder barely recognizes his son in the mirror. He remembers when they thought their son was an alien. “It’s never been this strong before,” he says. “Has it?”

“It’s gotten stronger lately,” Will admits. “The last few weeks.”

“Since—”

“Yeah.”

“Does your mom know?”

Will shrugs. “Yeah. But she’s trying not to.”

“Will.” His son averts his eyes, but Mulder continues anyway. “You said your mom could help.”

There’s a long pause. Finally Will nods, the gesture so slow and small that he almost misses it.

When Scully comes back she just says, “Let’s go,” and they do. She puts the vial back in the box, and gives it silently back to Will. They drive into the growing darkness.

After a while Mulder asks, “What’s in the vial, Scully?”

She doesn’t avoid the question this time. She doesn’t even flinch. “Pentobarbitol.”

Mulder blanches. “That's—”

“I know what it is,” she says quietly.

“Scully.”

“There are worse things than dying, Mulder,” she says, and he doesn’t understand the calm in her voice. “You know that.”

In the mirror Will’s eyes are bright, almost glowing.

He drives.


	8. after

When they pull up — finally, finally — to the house, there’s a low electric buzz and a light on in the kitchen. It takes Mulder a moment to remember that this should make him nervous. For years it’s just meant that Scully is home early from work. Now it means someone is there who isn’t supposed to be.

He thinks of those headlights.

It’s only midafternoon. They still have hours of daylight if they need to turn around. Not that he has any idea where they would go.

Scully turns to Will. “What do you think?” She’s quiet, as though whoever’s inside might hear her.

Will shakes his head. “I’m not getting anything. But maybe that’s a good sign.”

“Stay in the car,” Scully tells them, and without any hesitation she grabs the gun and goes.

She used to get so angry when he did that kind of shit — when he’d tell her to just stay in the car so he could go charging ahead into danger. From the back Will says, “She’s trying to protect you,” and Mulder’s lips press into a thin line. He thinks, _we’re supposed to protect each other_. He knows she’s been keeping him in the dark and he hasn’t confronted her, not yet, but a reckoning is coming.

Barely a moment later she emerges from the house and gestures toward them. Scully’s posture is easy and inexplicably she’s _smiling_ , for the first time in weeks. Mulder and Will follow her inside, still cautious and slow. He can’t shake the tension of the last week out of his body.

They didn’t find Matt, but Walter Skinner found them. He’s sitting at their kitchen table, looking simultaneously uncomfortable and pleased.

He gets up out of his chair to shake Mulder’s hand and then, briskly, Will’s; the kid looks pleased to be greeted with a handshake. “Good timing. I was going to leave tomorrow,” Skinner says. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming back.”

The four of them sit back down around the table. Scully frowns, looking down at the empty surface. “I left a note on the table. You didn’t see it?”

Skinner shrugs. “There was nothing here.”

Scully’s eyes narrow further, but Mulder knows this house; it’s drafty and old and his stuff seems to disappear all the damn time. He’s sure they’ll find the note a month from now, stuck in a vent or a loose floorboard.

“You’re staying?” Mulder asks.

“For now.” Skinner scratches at the back of his head, looking uncomfortable again. “We should talk.”

And they will, but for now, Mulder is focused on the relief he feels, that someone they know is _alive_. Their fruitless search for Matthew had made him afraid that they were the only ones left; Skinner’s reappearance seems like a sign. It’s not like they’ve been in close touch with Skinner all of these years. He’d continued moving up in the Bureau; Mulder and Scully moved on to other lines of work — safer, easier lines of work — and sent him an email every once in a while, in fits of nostalgia. But he’s a friend, and a connection to a period in their lives when they would’ve been better equipped to handle the apocalypse, and seeing him is deeply reassuring.

Skinner helps them carry their scavenged supplies in from the truck. They drag another mattress down to the basement.

* * *

 

Once the sun sets they turn the generator off and sit around the kitchen table in the dark. Scully lights a candle.

“Your instincts are good,” Skinner says approvingly. “Lay low after dark.”

“Why?” Will asks, cocking his head.

Skinner looks at them, then nods toward Will. “Maybe we should wait until…”

But Scully shakes her head. “This is his life now,” she says quietly. “He has the right to know.”

“They’re rounding people up,” Skinner says. “Saying it’s for public safety. It happens at night. Frankly, I assumed that’s what happened to you.”

“Not yet,” she says.

Skinner shakes his head, emphatic. “Not ever.” He glances over at Will, briefly. “You cannot let them take you.”

Scully echoes, “There are worse things than dying,” and Skinner gives her a hard look.

“I mean it, Dana.” The older man looks distinctly uncomfortable. He sets his glasses down on the table and rubs the bridge of his nose, trying to decide where to start. Finally he says, “So where were you?”

“Driving,” Scully says. “Looking for my nephew. West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky…it’s all the same.” She swallows. “Empty. We stopped in dozens of towns and we can’t have seen more than a few hundred people.”

“The first wave of attacks had an extremely high casualty rate,” Skinner says gruffly. “I don’t have information for other cities — the president was keeping those numbers close to his chest — but in D.C., they estimated a forty percent casualty rate on the first day, and more than half of those were fatalities.”

Mulder shakes his head, disbelieving. “What could kill that many people?”

Skinner shrugs. “They were organized. Bombs, fires, coordinated shootings. And then — I assume you’ve seen victims of the disease. It’s highly contagious. It only took a few hours to blockade the cities, but people had already left. And within the cities…”

She looks at Skinner. “Are you—” she asks, and he nods shortly.

“Clean. I’m immune.” He raises an eyebrow. “As are you, I assume.”

“Scully?” Mulder asks.

She changes the subject. “What about the rest of the world? It can’t be like this everywhere.”

There’s a long pause. Skinner says, slowly, “The president…retaliated.”

He lets that sink in.

Will is the first one to speak. “Does he even know who attacked us?”

“Does it matter?” Skinner snaps. “Someone had to take the blame. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. They shut down the airports but people crossed borders on foot. The first cases of the disease appeared in Toronto, Vancouver, and Tijuana six hours after the attacks.”

“And where is the president?” Scully sneers the word.

Skinner waves his hand, dismissive. “Holed up in a bunker somewhere with a dozen men and the nuclear codes. No one is taking control of the situation, if that’s what you’re asking.” She can see his Adam’s apple move as he swallows, hard. “We’re on our own.

Will says, "So this is it. The end of the world.” His voice is flat, affectless.

“Probably,” Skinner agrees, looking the boy in the eyes. “But we’re still here.” He looks to Mulder, and then to Scully. “The question is, what are we going to do now?”

* * *

 

After everyone else is asleep in the basement, she goes back upstairs. She catches sight of her reflection in the window: hollow-eyed, her blouse loose where it used to be perfectly tailored, her long hair in a ponytail she put in two days ago. She needs a shower, a full meal, an entire fucking bottle of wine. None of those things are forthcoming.

Under the window, with the light from the moon shining in, she takes out the journal. There are rough edges where she tore out the note she left behind. It wasn’t something she’d imagined. The note was there, and now it’s missing.

She writes, _The world has gotten so small_ , then sets the pen down. Closes her eyes.

The basement stairs creak, advising her of someone’s approach. It’s Mulder, because of course it is. He collapses onto the couch and leans back, crossing his arms over his chest.

“How much of that did you already know?” His eyes are steel.

“A lot,” she says quietly.

“That whole time,” he says. “You didn’t let me go out. What do they have, Scully?”

She licks her lips. Her eyes flit toward the corner of the room, away from him. “You’re not asking the right questions.”

Against the cushions his fists clench and unclench. “Stop fucking around, Scully.”

“It’s not _what_ , Mulder. It doesn’t matter _what_ it is. What matters is where it came from.” Their eyes lock.

All the things she should have known, should have seen coming. Over the past few years she’s seen all kinds of strange cases come through the hospital, diseases no one had ever seen, bacteria that multiplied faster than the laws of science permitted. In the new world the laws of science were evidently as mutable as the laws of man. But she hadn’t made the connection. Not until it was too late.

“I think this has been in the works for a long time,” she says softly. “I think the men we fought against have finally made their move. They just had to wait for a leader who wouldn’t try to stop them.”

“They’re collaborators,” Mulder says roughly. “All of them.”

“I know. I know what they are.” And this shouldn’t have surprised her, either. She’s a realist. She knows that the world gets worse and then incrementally gets better, and then gets worse again. This is the real arc of history, as far as she can tell. The moral arc of the universe is really just a sine curve.

“Skinner said he was immune to it.”

Scully nods. “He was vaccinated, I think. I imagine most people at his level would be. And I…after I was abducted I had some unusual antibodies in my blood. Will has all of those antibodies, too. I think…I think they’re preventative. I think they’re from wherever the disease is from.“ By the end her voice is barely audible.

"I don’t have them, though,” he says flatly.

She hesitates.

He gets up from the couch and crosses the room in one sudden smooth motion. “That’s why you wouldn’t let me out of the car,“ he says to the window. "You thought I’d catch it. Jesus, Scully. You could have fucking told me.”

"I hoped I was wrong.” She stands to join him. When she touches his forearm he flinches back, closes his eyes like he’s trying to block her out.

He says, “So it’s just a matter of time.”

She’s defiant. “That’s not what I said.” The blood and the bone and the horror, and she thinks, _I am not going to let this thing happen to you._

“Yeah? And what are you going to do?”

“Skinner wants — he wants me to go with him,” she says, slow. “Try to synthesize a new vaccine. While you’re here, running the safe house.” She can see that familiar twitch in his jaw and she wants to beg him not to say it.

But he does, inevitably. “Of course he does,” Mulder says, sharp as a knife’s edge. “He’s finally got a shot.”

Her entire body stiffens. “Don’t you _dare_ ,” she hisses. “Where’s your head, Mulder? We’re talking about the survival of the human race.”

“Maybe we don’t deserve to be saved.”

“Well, you’re not the one who gets to decide that.”

“And you do? Maybe we should just let nature take its course, Scully. We’ve fucked things up badly enough—”

“Do you want the truth, Mulder?” she spits. “This is for you. I am doing this for _you_.”

Her breaths come shallow and she’s suddenly, strangely panicky. She presses her open palm to her chest and turns away from him. She remembers what the air smelled like a month ago. It’s stale in the house, it reeks of mildew and unwashed bodies, and outside the moon is staring back at them and she just has to remember how to breathe—

From behind her Mulder puts his hands on her shoulders and even though he’s most of the reasons she’s angry right now, his hands steady her. She turns and wraps her arms around him, feeling her heartbeat slow to match his. She listens to it beat, _a-live, a-live, a-live._

“I don’t know how to fight this,” he says gruffly.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she says into his chest, her voice thick. “We can’t hide forever. I have to feel like I’m doing _something_.”

“We’re too old for this shit, Scully.”

“I know,” she says, not quite laughing. It’s a watery sound, uncertain. “I still have to go, Mulder.”

She can feel him swallow. “When?”

“It could be a week. Maybe a month, he wasn’t sure. Someone will come get us when it’s time.” Scully holds him tighter. _This is a choice_ , she reminds herself. _You are making a choice_.

They hold each other in the dark. She pretends it doesn’t feel like goodbye.


	9. before

One night, when they were young, he held her in the dark and promised, “I’m never going anywhere, Scully.“ Buried his face in her hair and said, over and over, "I’m never going anywhere. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

And she believed him.


	10. before

He appeared at her door with snow on his shoulders and hat and eyelashes, a box of Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix — also covered in snow — in his hands. He wasn’t wearing gloves, which didn’t surprise her, and his skin was chapped and red.

Scully pulled her robe tighter and rubbed her nose in sympathy with his. “Mulder, how did you even get here? The Metro’s closed.”

“Walked.” He pulled off his coat, shaking the snow out in the hallway.

“From work. In a blizzard.”

He made a face. “I’m from Massachusetts, Scully. This is _not_ a blizzard.”

“Fine. You walked here from work. In the snow.”

Mulder crossed behind her and filled her kettle with water, setting it to boil on the stove. She wanted to be annoyed when he set his hand at the small of her back and led her over to the couch, but she just couldn’t work up the energy.

“I just wanted to see how you were holding up,” he said, and before she could open her mouth to snap at him that it was none of his business and she didn’t need his help, he added, casually, “With the snow.”

The kettle whistled. The smell of the hot chocolate made her feel sick, honestly, but she held the mug in her hands and felt warm for the first time in months. He sat next to her on the couch. When her drink cooled off and she shivered, he tucked a blanket around her and then — cautiously, slowly — leaned his head on her shoulder.

It occurred to her that maybe he needed this as much as she did.

One night, when they were young, they watched the snow fall outside, and she tried not to wonder if it would be the last time.

It wasn’t, of course.


	11. after

On October sixteenth, a storm drops four feet of snow overnight; an unprecedented, unnatural event in the warm valleys of Virginia. In the morning the snow continues unrelenting, white on white on white. It half-buries the little house.

Mulder buries his relief; his own selfishness makes him sick.

No one is going anywhere.

* * *

 

 _we had so many things back then_  
 _I had a silver Mont Blanc pen_  
 _and I’d write for hours about nothing_  
 _that makes any difference now_  
—Quiet Hollers, [“Mont Blanc”](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fquiethollers.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fmont-blanc&t=NjQxYzI0OTVmYzAzMGFiZTNhN2ZlNGY2ZTQ1YTgwOGJmMmY4MDcwNyxJRTFtNWZ2NA%3D%3D&b=t%3AbkEJOfCBPwl9RzxGvC2jjQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fall-these-ghosts.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F157295945757%2Finterlude&m=1)

* * *

 

Will sits in his bedroom staring at the wall, unmoving. Trying to conserve heat.

Sometimes he stares out the window, trying to will the snow to melt. Sometimes he thinks it’s working. That worries him more than anything else.

The temperature outside hovers just below freezing. The temperature inside is a little warmer — the thermometer stuck to the wall in the laundry room says thirty-eight, though Will’s pretty sure it’s colder upstairs. At least he can be by himself up here. He’d thought he was going stir-crazy back when he could at least go out into the yard. He’d had no idea how bad it could get.

He’s wearing two pairs of socks under his snow boots. A pair of long underwear that doesn’t really fit him, from a winter camping trip he went on in middle school; an undershirt and a sweater and a fleece and a coat. That’s the other reason he’s not moving: he can barely walk in all the layers. And he’s still cold.

He wouldn’t be so cold, he thinks, if he weren’t also so _hungry_.

The end of the world sucks, basically.

The adults in the house are all on edge, and the things they’re thinking are strange and uncomfortable. Will’s dad, in particular, keeps looking at him like he’s an especially challenging math problem. Like he’ll get a prize for solving it.

Will takes his mittens off and pries a thumbtack out of the wall. It had been holding up a calendar — from 2014, the last time Will bothered to put up a calendar in his bedroom — which falls to the floor.

Experimentally he pokes at his thumb. It’s callused and the tack isn’t all that sharp, and he has to push hard to break the skin.

When he succeeds, he yelps and quickly pulls it out again. He stares transfixed at the red bubbling up around the pinprick. He dabs at it with a tissue and watches the stain, spreading. It looks just like everyone else’s.

He knows that’s a stupid thing to think, knows that the important things aren’t what you see on the surface. Everyone bleeds red. But the things that matter aren’t visible. Say, the fact his father’s blood is Type A, and Will’s is Type O. That matters. He could give blood to his father, but not the other way around. His father’s blood would kill him. Will’s cells would tear themselves apart. He thinks about that, sometimes.

Antibodies are invisible too, but the word is a constant presence, echoing in the darkened kitchen when they think Will is asleep under his stacks of blankets. His parents and Skinner are constantly muttering about tests and treatments and vaccines and he hears his own name spoken low, and every time he hears it all he can think is, _I never asked for any of this_.

Later his mom will notice the blood-stained tissues in his garbage can and he’ll tell her it was an accident, that he stepped on a tack, but he disinfected it and it’s all better now, don’t worry.

She’ll worry anyway, that crease forming between her brows. He’ll wonder if she’s worried because he hurt himself, or because he wasted a hundredth of a milliliter of his special, special blood.

He is still trying to will the snow to melt. He is sure, now, that it is working.

* * *

The days pass, and the weeks. They are in stasis. Waiting for the sun, waiting for the snow to melt.

A few days in, Mulder had shoveled a path to the shed and retrieved some firewood he’d stored there the previous winter. The house is old, with a woodstove they’ve only ever used for what Scully calls, mysteriously, “atmosphere”; it keeps them warm now, at least for a few hours each night. The wood is dry and there’s not all that much smoke, but on bright days in this dead landscape, it’s a beacon. And they are not looking for unexpected visitors.

He never thought the end of the world would be so intimate. Sitting up night after night huddled around the woodstove with Scully and Will and Walter Skinner. His imagination could never have invented something so strange. The four of them sometimes go the entire day without speaking. Will finds hiding spots all over the house. Skinner prowls the first floor and the area between the house and the shed like he’s on guard duty. Scully writes in that journal. Sometimes he thinks about reading it when she’s not around, but something always stops him. Maybe he’s afraid of what it says.

It’s late in the afternoon on what Mulder thinks is a Tuesday. Once it gets dark they’ll retreat to the basement, as usual, lighting candles to see by. For now, he’s lying on the plush blue rug in their bedroom, Scully’s arm draped over his chest, her head tucked under his chin. The sky outside is frosty pink, fading to dark.

Scully asks, “Why are we doing this?”

Her hair is long now, hanging down past her shoulder blades, and the color of autumn leaves where the dyed part has grown out. Darker than he’d expected, and warmer. He runs his fingers through it.

“What do you mean?“

Her hesitation fills the air between them. “Trying,” she says, after a long moment. “When there’s nothing left. What are we staying alive for?”

"The snow will melt eventually, and you’ll go find a cure,” he says, hoping the words don’t sound hollow, hoping it’s not obvious that part of him hopes it stays winter forever.

“Do you really believe that?”

Scully is not supposed to be the one asking those kinds of questions. She’s not allowed to be. Scully is steady. Hell, Scully is religious. “Come on, Scully,” he cajoles. “We always wanted to save the world.”

Another pause, longer this time. Her fingers trace little circles across his collarbone. She says, “What if God abandoned us?”

He doesn’t say, _God abandoned me when I was twelve years old_. Mulder doesn’t know what he believes anymore, but it’s not in Scully’s God. He can’t bear for her to lose faith and he has no words to reassure her. Lately he feels like it might all be a cosmic prank and twenty years ago he’d have told her that, but one of them has to believe in something.

So he kisses her, the cold from the floorboards seeping through the rug, and she slides over him easily, her cool skin warming under his touch; they have always created their own heat, and she is the only religion he has ever believed in.

* * *

 

There is at least one good thing about the snow: there are fresh prints every morning from deer, rabbits, squirrels, and all the other small things that still live in the woods. It’s comforting to know that they are not entirely alone. She tries not to think about the possibility that they may, at some point, need those animals for food. She’d rather save her bullets for creatures who deserve them.

There is no shortage of those.

They’ve had five straight days of sunlight and the snow is starting to melt. Outside the window Skinner is stomping around the yard, brow knit in concentration. Mulder is upstairs doing who knows what, and Will—

Lately Will makes her nervous. His blue eyes absent, unfocused; he spends hours holed up in Mulder’s old office, and Scully doesn’t want to ask him what he’s doing in there. He has little enough privacy as it is. She can’t decide if she is afraid for him or afraid of him.

She can feel the narrative unraveling.

In her notebook she writes tirelessly, looking for connections, clues that might lead her to answers. She thinks of her father more and more often these days. The stories he’d read her before bedtime, tales of quests and journeys. It was the only time she had her father to herself; none of her siblings had the patience for being read to. But Dana had loved those moments: her father’s gruff voice, the sound of the pages turning. She’d read to Will like that, too. Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit. She still has her father’s old copy of Moby Dick — it was the only specific bequest he’d made to any of his children, a fact that had driven a wedge between her and Bill that they’d never entirely overcome — but she’d never read it to Will. It belonged to her and Ahab, and anyway, by the time Will was old enough for it, he’d wanted to read things all on his own.

She’d understood him better then.

Skinner comes back inside. “I’m going to walk to town,” he announces.

Scully closes the notebook and stares at him. “You’re not serious.” The snow outside is still at least eighteen inches deep and town is eight miles away, no easy trek in good weather.

But he reaches behind him and holds out a ski pole. “I went looking through your neighbor’s shed.”

“You’re not serious,” she repeats. And on the other hand, why hadn’t they thought of it earlier? The McNallys, a two-lawyer husband-and-wife team with three comically good-looking children, played every sport Scully had ever heard of, and some she hadn’t; she’ll never forget when Will came home from their house asking if he could take up hurling.

“There are two pairs,” Skinner says.

Mulder’s halfway down the stairs. “Two pairs of what?”

“You any good at cross-country skiing?”

He raises his eyebrows. “It’s been about forty years.”

“It can’t be you,” Scully says quietly. “I’ll go.”

His eyes flash dark but it’s gone in a second. He straightens his back. “Sure,” Mulder says. “Of course.”

“What are you expecting to find?” She addresses the question to Skinner. Scully knows what she expects: a ghost town where she used to buy groceries and pick up lousy take-out Chinese. Bloodstains on the floorboards and darker things, too, and the bodies taken away, stolen, the memory of headlights in the dead of night.

Skinner leans his back against the door. “A message. Information still travels, Dana, you know that. You carried some of those messages yourself.” All those lists of names; she still sees them on the back of her eyelids at night. “Or — it’s possible my contact made it there before the snow.”

“And he’s stayed there for three weeks?” Scully asks, dubious.

The older man gestures toward the window, where the sun glints too-bright off the snow. “Where else would he have gone?”

She remembers Antarctica, her feet sinking deeper into the snow with each desperate step. She remembers looking behind her to see how far they’d come. It felt like they’d been walking for hours but the place where they’d fallen was only a hundred feet back. Their footprints in matched sets then, as always, except where one of them had pulled the other through.

“If we’re going, we do it now,” she says, and she doesn’t look at Mulder. “So we can get there and back before the sun sets.”

“Agreed,” Skinner says.

Scully fights the urge to hunt down Will and tell him goodbye. _We’ll be back tonight_ , she reminds herself. _He won’t even notice we’re gone._

* * *

 

The sun goes down. From the basement Will listens for the locks on the door clicking open, but there’s no sound from upstairs except his dad’s relentless pacing. His mom and Skinner don’t come home.

Will lies on one of the twin mattresses in the basement, arms crossed over his chest like he’s lying in a coffin. He doesn’t light a candle — it seems like a waste, just for him — and there’s no light from upstairs either. Eyes wide open, he stares into nothing.

Finally — after a long, long time — Will rolls onto his feet and goes upstairs. Everyone can hear you coming up from the basement; Will can’t count the number of conversations that have stopped abruptly, the second the adults heard the telltale creak of Will’s feet on the basement stairs.

So it seems like bad news when his dad doesn’t move at all, not even in acknowledgement. He’s sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and a bottle of — probably vodka? — on the table next to him. He looks like hell.

Will realizes this suddenly, even though his dad doesn’t look any worse now than he did six hours ago, or yesterday, or last week. The changes have been so gradual. His dad has lost weight — they all have — and his hair’s too long and there’s so much more gray in it than there ever used to be. His beard’s grown in scraggly and unkempt; the rest of his face is ghost-white. When he finally looks at Will, his pupils are so huge that his eyes look black.

“Dad,” Will says, without meaning to.

His dad makes no movement to hide the liquor. Maybe this is being an adult, Will thinks. When adults stop trying to hide things from you.

He’s not sure he likes it.

“How do we even have that?” His parents aren’t heavy drinkers. There’s always wine and beer in the house somewhere, and maybe eggnog at Christmas, which his dad loves and his mom can’t stand, but not much else. And it’s not like Will hasn’t looked.

His dad’s gaze follows Will’s toward the bottle, coming into focus and then out again. “Not ours,” he says.

Will feels a sudden lump in his throat. _Which house, Dad?_ he wants to ask. _Which of our dead friends are you stealing from?_ And not just stealing food or lighter fluid or firewood, not things you actually need to survive. What he actually says is, “That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah,” his dad agrees. At least he doesn’t argue. He does take another swig from the bottle. For a second Will is worried his dad is going to offer him some.

“Remember the first day?” he asks, taking the seat furthest from the bottle.

His dad doesn’t say anything.

“Mom came home,” Will persists. “She’ll come home. And she’s not gonna be impressed with you.” That is definitely true.

They sit together in the dark. Will thinks that years from now — if he lives that long — this is how he will remember his sixteenth year: this old hand-me-down wooden table, the night pressing in from outside. Knowing that the world outside is falling apart and you won’t see when it finally collapses.

“I wanted your life to be better than this,” his dad says finally. “Better than mine.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

His smile is sad, and small. “No way to know that for sure.”

Will doesn’t know how to comfort his father; he still sort of feels like he shouldn’t have to. But he sits up with him anyway.

If they come back with a message, then Will’s going with them, wherever they’re going. They need him — need whatever’s flowing through his veins. And that leaves his dad here, all alone.

After a few hours his dad falls asleep, head resting on his arms on the table. Will takes the bottle and pours it outside, into the snow.


	12. after

Lockport, Virginia isn’t exactly the ghost town she’d feared. Not like some of those towns they passed through in Ohio and Kentucky, where everything was perfectly preserved. Like bugs in amber, or the Pueblo cliff dwellings in Colorado. Plates and bowls left out on tables and no bodies anywhere.

The outskirts are entirely deserted. No smoke from any of the chimneys, no ragged survivors peering out of frosty windows. The houses are cold and dead. Some of them are torn up — an exterior wall missing, so Scully can peer in like a dollhouse. The corner stores have empty shelves and broken windows like jagged teeth. It makes her shiver, but at least it’s evidence of life after the attacks.

They pause not too far from Will’s old elementary school. “What if no one’s here?” she says, but Skinner shakes his head, resolute.

“There were,” he says. “It wasn’t that long ago.” She doesn’t ask what he’s talking about.

And as they come closer, they see it. There’s a rough barricade surrounding the very center of town: the square, the library, the village hall; a handful of stores and houses. The makeshift fence must have been put up before the snow fell. Furniture, felled trees, wood that looks like it came from the sides of those houses. It wouldn’t stop an army, but it’ll stop them.

Squinting in the light, Skinner points east. A break in the fence, and men with machine guns. Again.

Scully states the obvious. “This seems like a bad idea.” On old instinct she reaches for her gun, and for the first time in years she’s reassured by its presence.

“Don’t you know these people?” Skinner asks.

She sighs. “I have no idea. I _did_. Some of them. But I don’t know who survived, I don’t know who’s here.” _And I don’t know how they’ve changed_.

Skinner checks his hip too, belying his confidence, but he says, “Only one way to find out.”

And she follows him over.

* * *

 

Forty-five minutes later Scully finds herself standing in a cold, dark room in just her underwear while two women in surgical masks — _those aren’t going to help you_ , she wants to snap at them, but somehow it seems like that would hurt her cause — examine her for the sores and pustules that mark the beginnings of whatever plague has destroyed their entire world.

“I’m telling you, I’m not infected,” Scully says again.

“All the infected say that, too,” one woman mutters.

That’s probably true. Scully doesn’t ask what they do with the infected.

When they finally finish the examination, they watch her get dressed. She’s not usually self-conscious, but she hates the thought of strangers seeing her like this, all bone and sinew and stark-white skin. The women shove her out the door, back into the lobby of the village hall where she and Skinner had been frogmarched.

He’s sitting on a rusty folding chair and looks up when he hears her footsteps. Scully raises one eyebrow at him.

“They didn’t kill us,” Skinner says.

“There’s still time,” she retorts.

They head back out into the town, leaving the smell of bleach behind them. And their guns — the men at the barricade had insisted. “No weapons inside,” a silver-haired man told them gruffly. “You can get ‘em when you go.” His thin-lipped glare made it clear that their leaving couldn’t come soon enough.

“They knew what to look for,” Scully says. The women’s fingers prodding at the flesh beneath her ribcage, the lymph nodes under her arms. “I’ll give them that.”

“We’ve all seen a lot of death.”

As they walk, Skinner’s eyes take in everything. Sometimes it’s hard for her to believe he’s had a desk job for going on three decades.

There are a handful of people out on the street. Hell, they’ve shoveled the street so there’s one to stand on. It’s almost civilized — the extensive pat-down at the gate notwithstanding. Heads turn their way, looking them over — these new interlopers. Scully examines each face in the hope of recognition, but there’s no one she knows.

Except one.

“Dana?”

Scully almost misses it. She’s hardly heard her own name these past few months, why would she answer to it? But the woman says it again and Skinner nudges her and her eyes finally focus in on the source of that voice.

It’s Mindy Rogalski. Micah’s mom, a fourth-grade teacher at Will’s old school. She runs — _ran_ , Scully reminds herself — one of those ladies’ book clubs where no one reads the books and everyone drinks the wine. Mulder had teased her mercilessly for it, but Scully went every month. All those years in the FBI, she’d forgotten what it was like to have female friends.

The woman jogs over, her grin impossibly wide. “Dana!” she calls again, and an instant later Scully finds herself bowled over in Mindy’s embrace. “I didn’t think you’d make it,” Mindy says, sniffling a little. “Out in the middle of nowhere. It’s been hard enough…”

Scully pulls back to look at her. “How are the boys?” she asks, before realizing a split-second later that the question might be painful.

Thankfully Mindy just smiles again. “They’re okay. Worried about their friends. Worried…” The smiles fades. “Worried about everything, I guess. And yours?”

“Fine,” Scully says. “At home. I just came to — it’s been almost a month since we’ve heard any news. I was hoping there might be a message here for me.”

From behind them, Skinner grunts, and Scully turns to him. “This is Mindy,” she tells him, and to her friend she adds, “This is Walter. He's…an old colleague of Fox’s and mine. He’s been staying with us for a while.”

Skinner and Mindy shake hands and it’s fucking surreal. Like she’s making introductions at the apocalypse dinner party. Mulder made a joke about that once, years ago — something about how the world would end before Scully voluntarily hosted a party. Turns out he wasn’t wrong.

“Micah’s gonna be so glad to hear that Will’s all right,” Mindy says, and links her arm through Scully’s. “If you’re looking for a message, I can hook you up. I know a gal.” Her voice is breezy, and she turns to look over her shoulder at Skinner. “Your friend can come too.”

* * *

 

Mindy leads them to what she generously refers to as “the post office”: a closet in the back of the public library, cramped enough that Mindy waits in the hall. A big-eyed young woman in her twenties shows them in. It’s incredibly well organized: there are files for every letter of the alphabet, and the missives are organized by the recipient’s last name.

Before, there were only a couple thousand people in Lockport, and a few hundred more who lived full-time around the lakes outside of town. Scully doesn’t want to guess how many people there are now, but whatever the number, it looks like there are thousands of papers. For the first time it seems possible that one of them is for her.

“Where do they all come from?” Scully wonders aloud.

“There’s a pretty good system,” the girl says, her voice a slow, familiar drawl. “And lots of folks make copies and leave ‘em at every town, if they’re not sure where their people ended up. Everything here they’ve got in Warrenville too, and Ashby, and all the towns through here. Most of the messages don’t get picked up. Not a lot of folks make it here.” She nods in the general direction of the barricade, her blond curls bouncing. “Not a lot of folks make it through _there_.”

“You should keep it that way,” Scully says firmly. “The quarantine will keep you safe.”

She can feel Skinner’s eyes on the back of her head, but she won’t fess up to the lie. There’s nothing to be gained from telling this particular truth.

But the girl’s too quick for them. “From the disease maybe,” she says, narrowing her gaze at them. “Nothing to keep us safe from the raids. They’ve just left us alone so far. We don’t know why. Kathleen Hardesty’s been going over to Carroll Station for months, getting messages and lists and all, but they’re gone now. It happened all 'a sudden.”

Scully narrows her eyes. “What do you mean, gone?”

She snorts. “What it sounds like. Even with the snow she was still going out there, but last week everyone was just — gone. Like they’d never even been there. They used to have a fence like we have, and that was gone too. Like it never even happened.” Her blue gaze goes distant for a second, then refocuses on Scully. “But you’ll want to look through these, I guess. What’s your name?”

“Scully,” she says. An old nervous habit, her tongue darts out to wet her lips. “Dana Scully. Or Fox Mulder. And he’s Walter Skinner,” she adds, nodding in his direction.

“Fox,” the girl mutters, but she pulls two bankers’ boxes from the stacks and starts rifling through them. The sound triggers old memories. File cabinets full of evidence, photos and letters and crime scene reports, extensive documentation of every imaginable horror — and plenty she could never have imagined. “Got a Walter Skinner,” the girl announces a minute later, and hands it over. Skinner barely glances at the envelope before he sticks it in his pocket. Another minute passes, and Scully feels her stomach clench. “No Scully,” the girl says finally. “Sorry. What’s the other one again? Fox…”

Scully can’t quite get the name out. Skinner fills in for her. “Mulder.”

This box is even more tightly packed than the last, but it takes the girl no time at all to find it. “Fox Mulder. There’s two here.”

With shaking hands Scully reaches for the envelopes. She opens the first one and her gaze immediately drops to the bottom of the page. “This is from you,” she says, and Skinner takes it from her.

“I sent this along months ago,” he says. “Just after it happened.”

She doesn’t take it back.

The second envelope contains two pieces of paper: one a torn sheet of looseleaf, the other a piece of pink carbon copy paper. Scully opens the letter first.

When she sees the name at the bottom, it becomes impossible for her to read the rest. “Oh my God,” she says. “Frohike’s alive.”

Skinner’s standing over her shoulder. “He was in October, anyway,” he says, and she hates him a little in that moment. _Just let me have this_. She never thought she’d be this relieved to hear from Melvin Frohike; she can’t wait to get home, to tell Mulder. They’ll find him, and maybe the others, and if they’re alive then why couldn’t everyone else be, too—

“Dana,” Skinner says quietly. He doesn’t sound happy. He sounds like he’s choking on something. Scully ignores him, trying to get her eyes to focus on the letter. He repeats her name, more insistent. “Let me see the other paper.”

* * *

 

_**FOUND** _


	13. after

She has lost time before. Entire months, even, and she never got them back. All she has still are scraps of memories: metal tables, metal tools, the sense that she had lost something that could never, ever be returned to her.

After Frohike’s letter, Scully loses an entire day. She could not explain how she got home, only that she must have, because when she is present in the world again it is mid-afternoon on the following day and she is lying on the couch in Mulder’s office. Covered in blankets, with his body warm and familiar behind her.

It’s the same couch he had in his apartment in Alexandria. To her mild irritation, the couch has followed them all these years: first to her apartment, after Will was born, then to their Cleveland Park condo, and finally all the way to the little lake house. The leather is worn and a conspicuous hole appeared on the back a few years ago, which Mulder repaired with black duct tape so it would “match”.

When Scully wakes up, her face pressed against the cushions, it could be twenty years ago. Just for a moment, she pretends it is. Mulder’s arm slung low across her waist, his nose pressed against her neck. She counts his uneven breaths. He’s not asleep either.

She shifts in the small space, just enough so he’ll know she’s awake. No — awake doesn’t seem like the right word. _Back._

When his mother died she held him just here, just like this. This old couch that remembers their bodies, that knows better than she does the ways that they have changed. Scully wonders where her mother’s body is, who found her, who typed her name.

There’s a sob, sharp and sudden, and it takes her a long moment to realize it’s in her own voice.

“I’m here,” Mulder says, his voice rough.

Scully doesn’t open her eyes. “Why didn’t I know?” she says. Her throat is raw, and she doesn’t remember why. “I should have—”

His arms tighten around her. “There’s nothing you could have done,” he says, because that’s what you say, and she has told him the same thing a thousand times before. His sister, his father, his mother. _There’s nothing you could have done._

Knowing is supposed to be easier. That was the gift they gave so many families: the knowledge that their daughter or brother or friend was _at peace_ — that’s what she used to tell them.

But they lied; this isn’t easier. Her mother’s name on a piece of paper: is that what knowing is? Not to see her or bury her, or to know how her story ended. Is this all the comfort they ever gave to anyone?

Scully is shaking and Mulder is steady, steady behind her, whispering against her skin. She thinks he’s saying _I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

All of those families, all of those years. She thinks, _I am sorry. I am sorry._

* * *

 

They eat before the sun goes down. His mom insists on saying grace. Will doesn’t know how to pretend to be grateful. Last year he’d counted down the days until Thanksgiving break, five glorious days off in a row. Now Will would do just about anything to go to school again.

This is Thanksgiving in 2017: Will, his parents, and Frohike and Byers and Skinner, weird old friends of his parents’ who’ve always floated around the periphery of his life. No uncles and aunts, no cousins, no Grandma. No Matthew. Maybe none of those people, ever again.

No one actually told him that Grandma died. When his mom and Skinner had come home from town two weeks ago he’d known immediately that something was wrong: his mom didn’t say anything, just sort of fell through the front door like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Will’s dad had whisked her away and they’d stayed in his office for the rest of the day, while Will stared bewildered at the closed door and Skinner sat at the kitchen table, unspeaking. At some point in the evening Will picked up the papers his mom had dropped on the kitchen floor. He saw his grandmother’s name and understood, finally, what had happened.

But no one ever actually told him. It makes Will wonder what else they’re hiding from him.

Earlier in the day his mom exhumed a can of cranberry sauce from somewhere way back in the pantry, but that’s the only recognizable Thanksgiving food. Everything else is the same stuff they’ve been eating for months: canned black beans, canned green beans, canned corn. The only difference is usually they don’t even bother to heat anything up. For this special occasion they cooked everything over the woodstove, like shitty camping.

Last year the adults had made Matt say grace at Thanksgiving and he’d opted for “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub”, at which point he’d been banished back to the kids’ table. Will had laughed at his cousin’s misfortune until he’d realized that eating with the adults was just as boring as eating with Uncle Charlie’s three million little kids. Except that with the little kids, there was no obligation to stay seated until everyone was finished. And Aunt Tara was the world’s slowest eater.

This year his mom says grace and Will closes his eyes. She says, “And we ask you, Lord, to keep watch over our family and friends who are not with us, until we are together again,” and even his dad says _amen_.

No one says anything else. It’s warm in the house for once, with the woodstove on and six people’s body heat filling up the air. They’ve lit candles for decoration instead of necessity. And even though the food isn’t good, there’s actually enough, for the first time in months.

Will munches on a spoonful of white rice. “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub,” he says thoughtfully. A grin twitches at his lips. Uncle Bill had been _so mad_. His entire head had turned violet with rage. Will and his dad had laughed about it later. Crazy Uncle Bill, flying off the handle again.

His dad looks at him now, a matching mischievous smile on his face. “I didn’t have any problem with it.”

“That’s why no one ever asks you to say grace,” Will says, and that’s definitely true.

His mom clears her throat. “No. No one asks your father to say grace because the one time your grandmother asked, he panicked.” She’s smiling too, which would have seemed impossible two minutes ago. “He couldn’t come up with _anything_. He was silent for the rest of the meal.”

“I did not panic,” his dad grumbles.

“You panicked,” his mom confirms, and then Frohike starts in on a long, rambling story about how once in college this hot girl invited him home for Thanksgiving and it turned out that she was just trying to convert him to some weird religion, and then Byers recites what sounds like the entire Wikipedia entry for said weird religion, and before long everyone’s talking and the sun is still up and the fire is still going. Most of the people who should be here aren’t, Will thinks, but we’re still here.

And he remembers Grandma praying to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. When Will was a little boy she taught him. _Dear Saint Anthony, look around, something’s lost and can’t be found_. Maybe that prayer works for people, too; maybe everything’s not lost.

Look around. Amen.


	14. after

_**FOUND** _

_**** _

* * *

 

Will has learned a lot from the files in his dad’s office. They’re interesting reading, even if he’s not sure how much is fiction.

He reads the file on his dad’s sister, Samantha, who disappeared when she was eight years old. The folder contains all kinds of stuff that almost certainly shouldn’t be in a file cabinet in a civilian home in rural Virginia: photocopies of police reports, a list of items in an evidence locker in Massachusetts, transcripts of interviews with suspects, including Will’s grandfather.

Samantha’s diary is in there, too. Will reads the whole thing even though it feels wrong. She’s dead, she’s been dead for decades. This is Will’s inheritance: the last words of his long-dead teenaged aunt, the way his dad’s eyes still cloud over whenever anyone mentions her name. Maybe he was just screwed from birth. His whole fucked-up family.

It’s a bright Saturday at the beginning of December when, after weeks of looking, Will finds his own file.

His dad’s organizational system is esoteric in the extreme, if there is a system at all. The files aren’t alphabetized or organized in any way that Will can discern, but he’s sure his dad knows exactly where everything is. Maybe you don’t need a filing system at all if you have a photographic memory. So it’s not like he could just go to W for William or S for Scully. But he’s in there, between a file marked _Flukeman_ and another marked, mysteriously, _Desperate Agglomerations_. The tab says _William 5-21-01_. Will had found the other Williams, files marked _William Mulder_ and _William Scully Sr._ , ages ago. His eyes had glazed over reading a report about the blood spatter at the scene of his grandfather’s death.

Yeah. Will was definitely screwed from birth.

There isn’t much in Will’s file. His birth certificate and social security card are in there — good to know, he figures, in case the world ever rights itself again, though that possibility seems more remote every day — and a photograph of him as a baby, marked _August 17th, 2001_ on the back in his mom’s handwriting.

And there’s a copy of an ultrasound. Will traces his own outline with his fingertip. He looks like an alien, but that’s what all ultrasounds look like. In fourth grade his teacher was pregnant and she showed them an ultrasound picture, and this kid Mark asked her if she was having a monkey. Luckily for Mark, she’d thought he was kidding. Mrs. DeLuca was mean as hell.

Behind that there are just a few more pages — cheap computer paper, some of it starting to yellow, with fold marks.

Medical records. Blood tests, it looks like. One every few years, starting from when he was a baby, all the way until last year. Everything’s in medical-ese and covered in numbers and notes in his mom’s handwriting, and one column just says out of range all the way down on every page. Stuck to the back of the last page is a blood-typing card. He recognizes it from a picture in his AP Bio textbook.

Will doesn’t have his dad’s photographic memory, but he loved that class. He remembers the diagram that showed how to figure out your blood type. When he got home from school he’d asked his mom his blood type and she’d told him Type O, like hers, but Will wanted to see for himself. He ordered a test online, and his results had come back just like this one: invalid.

His teacher, Mr. Irwin, had just shrugged when Will brought it in. “Your sample was probably contaminated,” he’d said. “That’s why they put the control on there.” He’d grinned at Will. “Don’t worry, kid. You’re special, but you’re not _that_ special.”

Now Will looks at the card and the post-it stuck to the front. He glances back at the other pages. _Out of range out of range out of range out of range_. His mom’s handwriting: _Dr. R running additional tests_. Another line circled and the word _antibodies?_ next to it. That fucking word again.

What he’d wanted to tell Mr. Irwin was that he had never wanted to be special. That all he’d ever wanted, really, was to be just like everybody else.

There is one more piece of paper. He hadn’t noticed it because it was smaller than the others, lined paper, torn out of a notebook. This one is in his dad’s handwriting. It’s a list of dates, ending on June 21st, 2006. At the bottom it says, _No add'l evidence of TK_.

Just like everybody else.

* * *

 

“So what am I?”

Scully looks up, bewildered, to see Will hovering in the doorway to Mulder’s office, a sheaf of papers in his hands. She sets down her pen. “What?”

Will’s hands are shaking. “You kept doing tests,” he says, and waves the stack in her direction. “What were you looking for? What _am_ I?”

She stands and crosses to him, taking the papers from his hands. His name, typed or handwritten at the top of every page, above the lab results that no one could ever really explain. She remembers swallowing her anger and her tears, insisting — dozens, dozens of times — that they run the sample again, and again; begging doctors and lab techs to explain all of the anomalies, to reassure her that Will was okay. That he wasn’t broken.

“Will,” she sighs, hoping to calm him, but he takes a step back.

“Don’t,” he snaps. “I’m not a kid. And I’m not — am I — am I even a human being?”

“Of course you are.” Without any conscious effort her back straightens. She looks up at him, dark-haired and freckled and gangly, every inch of him hers and Mulder’s — with all that entails, the good and the bad. She says, with a fierceness in her voice that surprises her, “You’re _mine_.”

Will is unmoved. “How do you know?”

She closes her eyes. “Because we tested that too, Will. Whatever else you are, you’re mine — mine and your father’s.”

“Whatever else I am.” He licks his lips. All the little things about him that are like looking into a mirror. “All that bullshit about my _intuition_. All those times when I thought I was reading your mind. Was I, really?”

Scully hesitates. Even after twenty-five years with Fox Mulder, even after the end of the world, it’s still hard for her to admit to impossible things. “Yes,” she says. “I think so.”

“ _How_?”

“I don’t know,” she says, and that’s even harder to admit: that when it came to this central mystery of her life, science had failed her so completely. “When I was taken, Will, I don’t…I don’t know all of what they did. All of what I was exposed to. But you’re human, you’re not—” She swallows. “There was — a girl.”

_A girl_. Her daughter, but she can’t make herself say the word. It’s been fifteen years since she talked about Emily. After Will was born it seemed like a bad omen, and anyway how could he possibly understand?

But Will understands well enough, whether he has psychic powers or just knows his mother too well. He recoils, the color draining from his face. “I didn’t know that.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” she says, and means it. In all these years she’s never thought about she would explain Emily to her son. She doesn’t even know how to explain Emily to herself. “She wasn’t — It’s just not. It’s something I thought was behind us. I wanted it to be behind us. She — Emily was a hybrid. She was…created, using my genetic material and something else, something…But you’re not, Will. I saved all of her test results, too, and they’re nothing like yours.”

“But they might want me anyway.” He doesn’t specify who _they_ are. She wonders exactly how much he knows. _You couldn’t have locked your file drawers, Mulder?_

She nods. Her voice is hoarse. “They might.”

“And you and Skinner want me, too. You think I can help. Because of what’s in my blood.”

“Maybe,” she says. “I hope so.”

His blue stare, unblinking even as he backs away, putting more and more space between them; she feels it like an ache. “You can’t protect me,” he says, shaking his head slow. The muscles in his jaw twitch. “If they want me they’re going to come, and you can’t stop them. You don’t even know what I _am_.”

And then he turns his back on her and flees up the stairs and she watches him go, her son, trying to escape a truth he can never, ever outrun; oh yes, she knows him. She’s been doing the same thing for years.

* * *

 

After a while she follows Will upstairs. His door is closed but unlocked, and when she lets herself in — after knocking softly, twice — he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall.

The mattress is gone, and the shelf that used to hold Will’s favorite books is empty. Everything else is the same, but the room still feels empty.

Scully sits down beside him, their knees touching.

“I would move heaven and earth to keep you safe,” she says, her voice low, and when he turns to look at her his eyes are bright with tears. Scully wraps her arms around him, her nearly grown son, and he presses his forehead to her shoulder. She strokes his hair, like she did when he was a little boy, but she can’t make herself wish that he had stayed that small forever. She whispers, “Heaven and earth.”


	15. after

On the longest night of the year, the temperature drops. Mulder zips up his coat and carries the thermometer outside. Ten degrees. The hairs in his nostrils freeze.

In the basement everyone else is already asleep. It stays pretty warm down there, especially with the curtains they’ve hung at the bottom of the staircase and in front of the well window. Still, they’d dug every moth-eaten blanket our from every closet in the house. He’s not even sure all the blankets are theirs; they found all kinds of weird stuff in the house when they moved in.

They’re sleeping more now than they ever have. They are all cold and hungry, all of the time, and the night is so long. And there’s not much to stay awake for.

Mulder still can’t do it. He ends up sitting upstairs in the dark by himself most nights, trying to read by the moonlight when it’s bright enough. And keeping watch, always. It’s been a couple of months since he and Scully watched those headlights sweeping the landscape, but he hasn’t forgotten.

Not that he knows what he’ll do if they’ll come. He’ll sound the alarm and—

Mulder packed bags for Scully and William, early on. A few changes of clothes, a makeshift first-aid kit, and some photographs. He did not pack one for himself. He does not think about why.

On the longest night of the year, Mulder goes around to the back of the house and brushes the snow off a plastic Adirondack chair. He doesn’t know what time it is — late — but he counts down the hours, watching fresh ice spiderweb its way across the lake.

He doesn’t hear Will and Scully until they’re next to him. _Some lookout you are_ , he thinks.

Scully brushes off the other chair but Will just plops down in the snow. This is a stupid thing to do — it takes days for clothes to dry — but Mulder doesn’t say anything. Teenagers should get to do stupid things, and Will gets so few opportunities.

“Do you think the whole lake’ll freeze?” Will asks, pitching his voice low so it won’t carry. His breath puffs out little clouds in the frigid air.

Mulder shrugs.

“It’s never frozen before,” he continues. “Not since we’ve been here, anyway.”

The world is silent. Far above them the stars are silent, too, and Mulder will never be able to look at the night sky without wondering what’s up there.

Further out from shore the lake is still and glassy. A perfect reflection, a bowl of stars.

“We should go back inside,” Mulder says, scrunching up his nose to make sure everything’s still working.

“In a minute,” Scully says quietly.

Will yawns and leans his head against Mulder’s chair. The only sound is the slow crackle of new ice.

If, a hundred years from now, some other race came down from the stars and landed here, it wouldn’t look so different, really. No electric light, no smog. Just the dark and the stars and the little houses, slowly collapsing, and the lake, big enough to hold the whole universe.


	16. after

_now I take precautions for my peace of mind_  
_I don’t know what difference it might make_  
_to hold on any longer_  
_but I cut the tree across the drive_  
_spend the daylight hours inside_  
_trying to make the place look empty_  
_so that no one comes around_

—Quiet Hollers, [“Mont Blanc”](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fquiethollers.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fmont-blanc&t=ZTkyODQxOTlkNTJmOWRlODNjZGRhMmIzZDc4MzM5ODBjMmI5MDAxMyxzRWZGTUtMMg%3D%3D&b=t%3AbkEJOfCBPwl9RzxGvC2jjQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fall-these-ghosts.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F158005744124%2Finterlude&m=1)

* * *

 

He wakes up to the sound of helicopters.

No — that can’t be right.

Mulder blinks into the darkness. There are all the normal night sounds: intermittent snoring, the creaking of mattresses as bodies shift, sighs and sniffles and deep breaths.

And below it all, unmistakable: the pulsing thrum of helicopter blades, the low roar of an engine.

The pile of blankets that usually contains Scully is empty, and bile rises in his throat. Scully, missing. He’s been here before.

He doesn’t wake anyone else. He grabs a flashlight from the corner and holds it, still turned off, in his hand as he takes the stairs two at a time.

In the living room he yanks the blinds open.

Over the frozen lake are two helicopters, circling high above the trees and the water, beams of light shining down on all of the houses. _Helicopters?_ he thinks. They must be _helicopters_ , but there’s something off about the sound and their movement and he can’t quite get his eyes to focus on them. They dip and hover erratically, and even as the lights chase toward him he doesn’t move, he is frozen in place.

“Mulder!” It’s Byers, shouting over the din of the engines. “Get back inside!”

Mulder turns to look over his shoulder. Someone behind Byers is holding a flashlight, so he’s just a lanky silhouette in the doorway of the little house. “Where’s Scully?” he shouts back.

He can’t see Byers’s face, but he can see that he’s shaking his head.

And then out of the corner of his eye, he sees something.

Two somethings. Two figures, one short and one tall, moving away from him, toward the center of the lake.

On the ice.

“No,” he says, though he can’t hear his own voice over the noise from above. Whatever they are, helicopters or something else, they’re lower now but further away, and Scully and Will are walking out into the middle of a lake that has never frozen all the way through.

Mulder runs.

* * *

 

She’s felt this before. A pull from somewhere deep inside her, anchored behind her sternum, impossible to ignore. A call that tells her everything will be all right, everything will be explained, if she just follows.

So she follows.

And her son is there, too, and she smiles at him. They told her he was impossible, but look.

Look.

She takes his hand. It’s cold, like hers. They aren’t wearing coats even though it is cold outside. It’s all right. They won’t need coats where they’re going.

Sounds fill up her head. Mechanical sounds. The singing of the ice as it creaks and crackles under their feet. And voices, like before, in a language she does not know but understands anyway, calling to her. And her son. He belongs to her, yes, but both of them belong somewhere else. They are called home.

The lights are beautiful. She wants them to shine on her. Away there are more ships, more lights, and some of the beams have people traveling in them. She doesn’t know if she sees this with her eyes, or if she just knows.

They walk and the ice sings and the lights shine down. She waits for them to find her.

* * *

 

“Scully,” he yells. Louder. “ _Scully_. William!”

He doesn’t care who hears him. He is screaming their names into the wind, against the engines and they don’t hear him, they don’t turn around. The snow feels like quicksand around his ankles, sucking him in, making it impossible for him to catch up. They are barefoot on the ice, their steps steady. Away from him.

And suddenly all the sounds stop.

 _All_ of them. No engine sounds or creaking ice; when he opens his mouth to call their names again, nothing comes out. Out on the ice, Scully and Will freeze in place and turn their faces toward the sky.

Mulder keeps running, but even his footsteps are silent.

One of the roving beams stills. Off toward the northwest, towards town. As he watches, the light sharpens somehow. Its edges become defined, no longer the hazy mist of headlights or flashlights or anything made by man. Like some enormous hand painted a white streak down the middle of the sky.

A scream pierces the darkness.

Their mouths are open but it doesn’t sound like them, and it’s a single voice anyway, and it sounds like it’s coming from everywhere all at once.

He tries to shout their names again but he still can’t, and the scream is like a vise tightening around his chest and he can’t breathe and he can’t hear anything but that scream, maybe he’s never heard anything else in his life, it sounds like the beginning and the end of everything—

And Mulder collapses to the ground, his hands clamped over his ears, as though anything could shut out that sound.

* * *

“Scully,” he yells. Louder. “ _Scully_. William!”

He doesn’t care who hears him. He is screaming their names into the wind, against the engines and they don’t hear him, they don’t turn around. The snow feels like quicksand around his ankles, sucking him in, making it impossible for him to catch up. They are barefoot on the ice, their steps steady. Away from him.

And suddenly all the sounds stop.

 _All_ of them. No engine sounds or creaking ice; when he opens his mouth to call their names again, nothing comes out. Out on the ice, Scully and Will freeze in place and turn their faces toward the sky.

Mulder keeps running, but even his footsteps are silent.

One of the roving beams stills. Off toward the northwest, towards town. As he watches, the light sharpens somehow. Its edges become defined, no longer the hazy mist of headlights or flashlights or anything made by man. Like some enormous hand painted a white streak down the middle of the sky.

A scream pierces the darkness.

Their mouths are open but it doesn’t sound like them, and it’s a single voice anyway, and it sounds like it’s coming from everywhere all at once.

He tries to shout their names again but he still can’t, and the scream is like a vise tightening around his chest and he can’t breathe and he can’t hear anything but that scream, maybe he’s never heard anything else in his life, it sounds like the beginning and the end of everything—

And Mulder collapses to the ground, his hands clamped over his ears, as though anything could shut out that sound.

* * *

 

And then the screaming stops, and the silence is even louder.

Mulder pulls himself up, his ears still ringing, and looks out toward the lake.

 _They’re gone_ , he thinks, and the words ricochet around his skull and he gasps in the freezing air like he’s drowning. They’re gone and so is everything: the lights, the ships, _everything_ , he thinks, and numbness spreads out from his center. Everything, everything.

A moment passes, and all he can do is stare slack-jawed at the flat, shiny surface of the lake.

Something out there moves.

Without any input from his brain, Mulder’s feet start moving again. Toward that movement, toward the ice, towards a voice he knows better than his own heart, calling out to him.

“Will,” he yells back, and finally he’s at the edge of the lake and he stops dead in his tracks.

The ice in front of him was never thick enough to go out on. Around the edges it’s still sturdy, unbroken, but Will—

He is on his knees at the epicenter, hairline cracks radiating out around him, and a patch just off to his side where the ice has already given way. And he’s reaching into the freezing water, and he’s sobbing something Mulder can’t hear, and in one terrible moment he understands what has happened.

* * *

 

Everything in slow motion. Everything all at once. He thinks, _I’ve never let you die before._

Indian Guides. He’d learned how to rescue people from the ice, fifty fucking years ago, for all the good it’ll do him now. There’s no rope, no oar; he’s not even wearing a fucking scarf.

And his son, barefoot on the ice in his pajamas, with his hands in the water. He will not let himself imagine that ending to this story, where Will joins Scully in the water, but he also won’t tell him to let go, not ever, not ever.

“Hold on,” he yells, and he steps out onto the ice.

It creaks under his feet and Mulder only knows half the words to any prayer, but he’s saying all of them at once.

He hears Will say, “Come on,” and he sees Scully’s head come up out of the water and hears her gasping and spitting and he thinks _fucking hold on, hold on, hold on._

“Dad!” Will chokes out, and Mulder’s only thirty feet away now but it might as well be a mile. If he keeps going the ice is going to collapse beneath all of them.

“I can’t come any further,” Mulder gasps.

“I can’t,” Will sobs. “ _Mom_.”

“Will,” Mulder says, and the calm in his own voice freaks him out. Antarctica, her lips impossibly, unnaturally blue, and she is still here and perfect and this is not, this is _not_ how he loses her.

Will looks at him, tear-streaked and shivering.

“Under her arms, Will,” Mulder says, like everything is fine. Like they’re practicing. Like it’s fucking Indian Guides. “Can you grab her under her arms?”

And his son reaches his arms deeper under water, one at a time, and Scully’s shoulders come up and she’s not breathing or spitting anymore, but he can’t think about that right now, not right now.

“Pull her up, Will,” Mulder says. “Keep pushing yourself backwards, towards me. Stay down to spread your weight out. Okay?”

“I can’t,” Will gasps, and even from here Mulder can see that he’s turning blue, too, and _I just need you to hold on a little bit longer_. “I can’t,” Will says again, but he does.

He does.

Slowly. Scully, white as death and soaking wet, and Will keeps pulling until finally, finally her legs and feet clear the top of the water and all Mulder can think is how incredibly glad he is that she wasn’t wearing her fucking boots.

She’s not moving. “You have to keep pulling, Will,” Mulder says, and the fear that’s been chasing him since he heard those fucking engines is finally catching up. “All the way to me.”

“The ice,” Will says, and Mulder swallows.

“I know. But it’s the only way.”

The ice moans with every movement Will makes, crawling hands-and-knees over the ice, pulling Scully behind him, and Mulder wants to close his eyes but he can’t close his eyes and it is the longest five minutes of his entire life.

And when they finally, finally reach him, he knows they’re not in the clear yet. Will’s skin is patchy red and white, and Scully — Scully is breathing. He can hear it, because every breath sounds like a death rattle.

Will stares at him.

“Go. Back to the house. Tell them what happened.”

“Mom—”

“I’ve got her,” Mulder says, because it has to be true. “ _Go_.”

* * *

 

When Mulder finally stumbles through the door, Scully cradled in his arms, he can see that Byers had immediately jumped into action. Will is wrapped in blankets and curled up on the recliner, his eyes closed and his dark hair sticking straight up. The woodstove is lit, and there’s a pot of water warming on top. He can hear shuffling from upstairs and downstairs. There’s a pile of towels and blankets next to the couch, and he lays her down.

With Scully unconscious it’s impossible to take her clothes off. He grabs scissors from the junk drawer and starts to cut. Beneath the fabric her skin is white and damp and freezing to the touch, but not blue, not black. It reminds him that they weren’t actually out there for very long, no matter that it felt like a thousand years. He dries her off and wraps a towel around her wet hair, then starts piling blankets on top of her. Her breaths are still shallow and shaky, but he thinks they sound better than a few minutes ago. Stronger.

“Wake up,” he says, without meaning to. She doesn’t stir.

He thinks about trying to take her temperature, but what’s the point? There’s no hospital to bring her to.

Frohike bounds up from the basement, more blankets in his arms. “Is she—”

Mulder presses the back of his hand to her cheek. “I don’t understand what happened,” he says gruffly. It’s a lie. He _does_ know. It’s happened before, and he’d just convinced himself that it was over. And Will, too — but he can’t think about that; that’s a problem for later. For when Scully is better. For when she’s well enough to fight with him about it.

Businesslike, Frohike stacks more blankets on top of Scully, and a few more on Will for good measure. He doesn’t stir.

“How’s Will?” Mulder asks.

Frohike shrugs. “We checked his fingers and toes. Frostbite, probably, but it looks mild. He’s fucking cold, though. Byers put some water on so he can have something hot to drink when he wakes up.” He looks suddenly nervous. “And Scully, too.”

“Yeah,” Mulder says, and swallows hard.

At odds with the depth of the night, the house is full of activity, but it all fades to a blur around him. A cup of tea, the low murmur of voices, more blankets. Someone hands him a hot water bottle and he puts it between two of the blankets; someone else asks him a question and he ignores it.

His fingers on the side of her neck, he counts her heartbeats. They’re slower than usual. He’s been falling asleep to their rhythm for a long, long time.

Eventually Skinner tells him they’re taking Will downstairs to sleep it off on a real bed.

“Watch him,” says Mulder, and it comes out harsher than he intends. “Don’t let him…”

“I’ll stay up,” Skinner confirms. “Yell if you need anything.”

And he disappears down the stairs with Frohike. Will is propped up between them, wearing Mulder’s slippers and a pair of flannel pajamas that are about six inches too short.

Mulder stays up, watching Scully. He strips off his shirt and pants and crawls under the blankets, wrapping his arms around her. She is still so cold. When the water bottle cools off — it doesn’t take very long — he heats it up. He feeds the woodstove whenever the fire starts to die down. They never keep it lit all night, but these are unusual circumstances. To say the fucking least.

She’s still breathing. Her heart is still beating. He wants to tell her _you’re not allowed to die_ , but he doesn’t even want to put the idea in her head.

Hours later, Scully shivers.

It’s the first time she’s moved at all since he brought her in. He says her name and she shivers harder.

“Sleeping bags,” she mumbles, and then goes silent again.

He stares at her, worried that he imagined it. “What?”

“’S cold.” Scully burrows down into the blankets, even closer against him. “Mulder.”

He’s not even sure she’s conscious.

“I’m here,” he says. “Wake up, Scully, c'mon…”

“What you said.” Her words slur together; Scully sounds like she’s drunker than she would ever get. “Body heat. But there’s no sleeping bags.”

He rifles through twenty-odd years of memories, trying to figure out what she’s talking about.

“Florida,” she says. Right. The Mothmen, and the bigger mystery: of all the songs in the world, Scully chose _that_ one.

“You’re awake.”

“Told you.” Somehow she manages to sound smug.

Mulder doesn’t mind. He presses his nose into her hair. “I thought you were gonna die,” he rasps, even though it feels like a jinx to say it out loud. “Scully.”

She’s shivering again and he thinks that’s good, that’s what the nurse said after Antarctica, you’re supposed to shiver when you’re hypothermic. She says, “I’m supposed to be immortal.”

“Let’s not test that again, okay?” He tucks the blankets around her.

Her nose is icy against his bare shoulder as she nods. “Okay.”

He reaches down into the blankets to lace his fingers through hers. Just to warm them up. She wiggles them a little, and he thinks that’s another good sign.

“You’re gonna stay up?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, and kisses her forehead. After a few minutes her breathing slows and evens out again, and he wonders if she’ll remember any of this in the morning. He mumbles, “Just don’t ask me to sing.”

From under the blanket she says, “I heard that.”

* * *

 

Scully is curled up on two of the couch cushions, weaving in and out of consciousness like she’s been doing for the last twelve hours. Mulder’s sitting on the third cushion, watching her. Everyone else is tip-toeing around the house. Frohike’s been unusually solicitous, keeping the woodstove going, getting drinks for Scully and Will whenever one of them wakes up. Mulder knows he’s not the only man who’s ever been in love with Dana Scully; he’s still surprised, sometimes, that he’s the one she chose.

It’s the early afternoon before Will comes back upstairs. Like everyone else, he’s wearing a hat and slippers and a coat; unlike everyone else, he’s also wearing a few fleece blankets around his shoulders.

Mulder doesn’t say anything to him. He realizes that the feeling is irrational, but he’s still furious just below the surface. He almost lost them both. And he blames himself, first and always, but there is plenty of blame to go around.

For a moment Will hesitates at the edge of the room, but eventually he comes and sits on the floor next to the couch, on Scully’s side. He looks up at her. “Is Mom gonna be okay?”

He still won’t look at his son. “I think so.”

Will gets up from the floor laboriously, like an old man, and pushes the recliner closer to the woodstove. He settles into it, pulling the blankets up to his shoulders.

They sit silently, the stove crackling between them. Mulder watches Scully’s chest rise and fall. Her lips are chapped and pale, her skin sallow. If she’d died. If he’d had to stand there thirty feet away and watch her drown.

Finally he breaks. “What were you doing out there?”

“I don’t remember,” Will says. Like Scully he’s unnaturally pale, except for the red splotches on his cheeks and the tip of his nose. “I remember going to bed, and I — I remember that noise.” His gaze locks on Mulder’s for a long moment. “The scream. And then we fell down, and then Mom.” His eyes flit to her still form. “And then Mom fell.”

Mulder turns away, feeling the muscles in his jaw twitch.

Will keeps staring at him. “Are you pissed at me?” he asks, incredulous.

“I’m just trying to understand,” Mulder says, which is a lie.

“I told you what I know,” Will snaps. “I don’t understand any of this either.”

More silence. Mulder knows he’s being unfair, but the fear is so hard to swallow, and impossible to ignore. When he’d looked up and it had just been Will out there on the lake, the ice breaking around him. He has never felt fear like that in his life.

Both of them gone, his partner and his son. It would’ve only taken a second. Every time he tries to sleep the scene plays out in high-definition detail on the backs of his eyelids: the night sky, the lights, the scream. Then the ice cracks under Will’s knees, or he’s pulled in trying to save Scully, and Mulder is entirely powerless to stop it.

And then he wakes up, and he is still entirely powerless.

When Will finally speaks, his voice is raw and uneven. “I saved her,” he says. “Mom’s alive because _I saved her_. And you just stood there.” Then he gets up and walks out, trailing the blankets behind him. He doesn’t slam the door. He doesn’t have to.

After he goes Mulder stares out the window, at the lake he’s always loved, and in the glass all he can see are his own nightmares playing on an infinite loop.

Maybe he’ll never sleep again.

* * *

 

Later, after Mulder has finally caved to Byers’s insistence that sleep is, in fact, necessary, Will comes back into the living room and sits where his father had been.

Scully’s awake now, has been awake for a while. She’d heard Will and Mulder’s conversation earlier, though she hadn’t realized until now — seeing Will’s face — that it really happened. This last day and night feel like a dream, recalled in flashes.

Quietly Will says, “Dad thinks it’s my fault.”

She sighs. “I very much doubt that.”

“I don’t even remember what happened,” he says, his voice plaintive, sounding much younger than sixteen.

“I know that, Will. And your dad knows that too.” She considers this, and then amends it: “Or he will tomorrow.”

Will snorts. “Sometimes he’s just…” He kicks at the bottom of the couch and glances at her sidelong. “Sorry.”

“You’re fine,” she says gently. “I didn’t always get along with my father either.”

Will’s eyes are piercing. “You never talk about him.”

“It’s hard.” She swallows. “I admired him very much. And he…I think he was always a little ashamed of me.” Maybe she’s never said those words out loud before. They’re painful coming out.

“But you’re a _doctor_.”

“Yes, and then I abandoned my medical training to work for the FBI. He couldn’t understand that.”

“Why not? It’s badass.”

“He was from a different time, Will. He didn’t think it was an appropriate line of work for a woman.”

He frowns. “Your parents should be proud of you no matter what. Unless you’re like, an ax murderer.”

“I’ve thought a lot about this since he passed, and you’ll learn this on your own too, but—” Scully hesitates and looks away, focusing on the embers glowing in the woodstove. She can still feel her son’s eyes on her. “When you’re grown up, you realize that your parents aren’t the heroes or the villains you believed them to be. And you have to find a way to forgive them for being the people they are, for raising you the way they did.” She closes her eyes. “I know it’s hard. You’re learning these lessons much earlier than I had to.”

It’s been so many years since her father died; the emotions shouldn’t be so close to the surface. She had been twenty-nine. That sounds so impossibly young now. She had seen so little of the world.

She got old fast, those years on the X-files. There are days when she feels the weight of a thousand lives’ worth of burdens. There are days when she still chokes on the knowledge that her father will never, ever tell her he is proud of her.

It’s a struggle to sit up, but she eventually manages. Will re-arranges the blankets over her and she smiles at him in thanks, then nods toward the bookshelf. “Bring that big one over here?”

Will examines the books, then pulls a particularly thick, dusty tome off the middle shelf. He wrinkles his nose. “This one?”

“That’s it.”

He hands it to her, then sits on the floor and leans against the couch, stretching his legs out long. Scully rests the book in her lap. It’s heavy; it smells like home.

He says, “You used to read to me all the time.”

“My father read this to me,” Scully says softly. “A few times, actually.”

Will closes his eyes.

The sun has gone down and the only light is the fire, flickering low. She squints and traces the words with her fingertips, but she knows the beginning by heart. Aloud she reads, “Call me Ishmael.”


	17. after

“I want to go,” Will says. His jaw is set, and he looks at once far younger and far older than his true age. His stubbornness reminds Mulder of when he was a little boy, insisting that ice cream wasn’t _only_ for dessert; the steel in his eyes is that of a grown man. Mulder had wanted so badly to protect that little boy, to ensure that he would never have to face the horrors his parents had; of course he’s failed.

Scully crosses her arms. “You can go.” She lets her glance flit over to Mulder, just for a split second, as though daring him to argue. He doesn’t. She adds, “But you have to keep up, and you have to stay quiet.”

“I can do that.”

“Then it’s settled. You have to take responsibility for your stuff, if you’re going. Check the skis. Make sure you have everything you’ll need in your backpack in case you get stranded or something breaks.” Will raises his eyebrows at this, but his mother just shrugs. “If you want to be treated like an adult, Will, you’ll need to act like one.”

Silently their son retreats to the shed, and Scully to the living room. Mulder follows her.

“This is a bad idea,” he says to the back of her head. The sun is just coming up over the horizon and the light turns her hair red, the color it used to be.

She turns on him and the illusion is gone. “We need to prepare him for what’s out there,” she says. “If, God forbid, he ever needs to survive out there on his own—“

“That’s not going to happen,” Mulder interrupts.

“I hope not. But hope hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”

That silences him.

“If something happens to us, it’s better for him to know what it’s like. If he knows how to get to town, he can go for help if he needs to, or join another family there.” She takes his hands, runs her thumbs along his palms. “He’ll be safe with Skinner. As safe as he is anywhere.”

“You still think they want Will.”

“I can’t explain what happened the other night. And until we know–” She bites her lip. “That’s what I’m assuming.”

“They called you, too.” And Mulder has barely slept since. Standing guard on the basement stairs, watching for any sign of movement. He will not let something like that happen again.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says quietly.

Mulder looks at her. “It’s dangerous.”

“Everything we do is dangerous.” The skin under her eyes looks bruised. She licks her lips and turns her eyes to the ground. “We can’t protect him, Mulder. I — I don’t know how to protect him.”

“So you’re throwing him in the deep end.”

She shrugs. “How else will we find out if he can swim?”

* * *

 

Will and Skinner arrive in Lockport, Virginia just after eleven o'clock in the morning.

There are no guards outside, waiting to confiscate Skinner’s pistol. Skinner goes through first and Will hovers just behind him. He knows how to shoot, but he doesn’t have a weapon.

He doesn’t really know what made him insist on going this morning. Only that he was still angry at his father, still felt helpless, and this seemed like something he could do. Go along, gather information, be immune. And hey, if he got to see another living human being that wasn’t his parents or their friends, well, that was just a bonus.

Not today.

Today there are no other ragged-looking survivors wandering the streets. There are no lights. And as Will follows Skinner through the open doors of the houses around the square, he can see that there are no bodies, either. But there’s food rotting on the tables, fires burnt to ash. Books open on coffee tables, waiting to be read by no one.

“They’re gone,” Will says, and Skinner gives him a sharp glare. They go back out into the harsh winter sunlight, wandering the streets. Skinner leads them down an alley behind a convenience store and Will sees it and then—

The lights, the lights. There’s a sudden sharp pain in Will’s right temple and he nearly falls over; the only thing that stops him is his hand braced against the cement wall. A split second later Skinner has his hand on Will’s shoulder, keeping him upright.

Somewhere in the distance he hears a dog, barking.

Will gasps, “The light took them.” His vision blurs.

Behind him Skinner pulls his gun — Will doesn’t see it so much as sense it — but there’s nothing here to shoot and no one here to save.

Will says, “It took them all.”

* * *

 

_**FOUND** _

* * *

 

Frohike stares at them, disbelieving. “They’re just…gone?”

“Why not?” Will’s mom snaps. “We passed dozens of towns like that.”

He looks slightly green. “We stayed there for a week. They’re good people.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s how they’re making decisions,” she says.

Byers’s brow is furrowed, arms crossed over his chest. “How _are_ they making decisions?” he wonders. “They came for you and William, then they took Lockport and left you behind. Why?”

“I have no idea,” his mom says, and Skinner says, “We don’t know that those events occurred at the same time,” and Frohike says “Just _gone_?”, all at the exact same moment.

“The wall,” Will says, but no one hears him. They keep arguing, their voices getting louder and louder.

“ _The wall_ ,” he says again, almost yelling to be heard, and they all stop suddenly and turn to him.

“What?” Scully asks.

Will shakes his head to clear it. “Outside. Near the corner store. And I tripped, I — the side wall, in the alley by the dumpster. Somebody painted it. It said ‘they’re here’.”

The adults exchange a glance.

“We must have shown him _Poltergeist_ ,” his dad says, looking to his mom for confirmation. “Right? I know we’re not great parents, but we must’ve watched _Poltergeist_.”

“I don’t think that’s the gold standard of parenting, Mulder,” she says.

“I’m just saying. I bet that graffiti’s been there for years.”

“It hasn’t. I would’ve noticed.” Will swallows. “And there’s this.”

He grabs his glove from where it was stuffed in his coat pocket and holds it out in front of him. The palm and fingers are stained bright red.

His dad takes the glove and pokes at it. His fingers come away red and he stares at them, eyes wide.

Will states the obvious. “That’s not how spray paint works.” He looks over at Skinner, who was there, who saw everything too. “There was food and stuff out — you could tell they’d been gone for a while. Spray paint doesn’t take a week to dry.”

“Then what is it?” Byers asks.

In their old life, Will’s mom would have brought it to some lab somewhere to run tests. In their old life, their questions had answers.

“It’s weird,” his dad says. “Tingly.”

And as they all watch, the color on his fingers darkens, taking just a few seconds to go from bright red to nearly black. Will’s mom grabs his hand. “It’s reacting to something on your skin,” she says urgently. “Water. Somebody.”

Will rushes to grab a bottle, and his mom takes it and pours it over his dad’s hand, over a bucket. At first nothing happens, but when she starts scrubbing at his fingers, the black starts coming off.

His dad groans low in his throat, a sound Will’s never, ever heard before, and as the blood starts pooling in his palm Will realizes that it’s not the black that’s coming off, it’s the skin.

“What the fuck—” Frohike starts.

“It’s okay,” his mom whispers, and his dad’s eyes are shut tight and his teeth are clenched. “You’re okay.”

His dad nods and he keeps bleeding and bleeding and Will can’t tear his eyes away. The black and red mingle in the bottom of the bucket, dark and viscous. Will stares at it. For a second it seems like the black is coming together, making patterns in his father’s blood, but when Will blinks the patterns are gone.

“What the fuck,” Will echoes, and his mom is wrapping his dad’s hand in a towel and saying to no one in particular, “Find _somewhere else_ to put that fucking glove, please,” and Byers puts it in a ziploc bag and holds the bag gingerly, away from him, like maybe it’s going to eat through the bag. And who’s to say it won’t?

Will looks at his own hand. His fingertips are red, too, from when he pulled off the glove.

Red. Not black.

He shoves his traitorous hand into the pocket of his jeans and doesn’t say a word.


	18. after

On New Year’s Eve there is no ball drop, no live broadcast from Times Square. Mulder turns the dial on the radio just in case, but it’s the same silence they’ve been hearing for months now.

They gather around the woodstove on chairs they’ve dragged in from other rooms. These past few weeks they’ve been feeding the fire with wood they took from the neighbors’ sheds. Since that night on the ice, they’ve been letting it burn late into the night and even during the day. So what if there’s smoke? The worst has already happened.

“I read about this,” Will says, resting his sharp elbows on his knees. He’s wearing gloves inside the house, which is new. Maybe the cold is finally getting to him. “This is what, like, Vikings did on the longest night of the year. They kept the fire going all night.”

Byers points out, “It’s not the longest night of the year.”

Will shrugs. “Every night feels like the longest night of the year.”

No one argues with that.

They gather around Skinner’s wristwatch, laid flat on the ottoman, as it counts down the last minutes of this long, long year. Mulder looks around the room. They’ve been in such close quarters for so long that he could pick the sound of any of their sneezes out of a lineup, but he is more distant from them than he’s ever been. The days roll into one another endlessly, and he spends most of them alone. The closeness is unbearable; the aloneness is unbearable, too.

It is 11:59, and the second hand ticks toward 2018. They watch it move.

And then it’s midnight, and everything is the same.

The watch keeps ticking into the new year. They sit around it in silence.

Will is the first to get up. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” he says brightly. “Night.”

One by one the rest of them retreat – to the basement, to the back room – until it’s just Scully and him left in front of the stove.

She’s perched on the edge of the couch, twining her fingers together and looking down at her clasped hands, her expression distant. After a minute she notices him staring, and places one hand on top of his. “Happy New Year, Mulder,” she says quietly. Her long hair falling in front of her face, her hands cool and dry.

The memory of her walking away onto the ice is raw.

Mulder gets down on his knees in front of her and she watches him curiously, brow cocked, her pupils big and dark in the firelight. He pulls her toward him, his thumbs stroking her face, his hands cradling her head, and he kisses her fiercely. Scully leans into it, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. She exhales his name. They fall back together onto the creaky floorboards, and he remembers another New Year’s Eve that ended almost exactly the same way.

He’d told her then: _The world didn’t end_. But later, back at his apartment, she’d kissed him like the apocalypse was still imminent, like at any moment they’d be torn from each other’s arms. That was how they always kissed back then, when everything was hazard and the fear of death; now everything has come full circle.

The world _did_ end, if a few years later than they’d expected. The world ended and they are still here.

* * *

 

No, this isn’t the apocalypse he’d expected.

It’s quieter. And slower.

Somehow he’d always imagined himself fighting the apocalypse from the front lines (maybe he really is a narcissist). Waving his gun around, shooting at the bad guys. At the least he’d thought he would be Chicken Little, warning the world that the sky is falling.

Instead, four months in, the apocalypse mostly looks like this:

Long winter nights. The sun sets at four-thirty, by Skinner’s watch (and what, Mulder wonders, will they do for time once that dies?), and doesn’t rise again until nearly eight in the morning, and in between they sit in the darkness together.

A week into the new year they run out of the wood they’d scavenged for the stove. Byers and Skinner – Mulder’s hand is still healing – go out to chop down a tree, but when they burn the wood it lets off a stench like sulfur or rotten eggs, like dead and decaying things. It’s not just that tree. They cut branches from other trees on other properties and it’s all the same.

So they pile on more sweaters; they light a tea light and huddle around it like prehistoric man around the fire. On Scully’s suggestion they take turns reading out loud. Now it’s _Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire_ , Will’s favorite, and frankly Mulder likes it because it’s thick and would take a long time to burn. He looks at a lot of things that way now. Scully’s expensive kitchen knives, Will’s baseball bat, the solid-wood kitchen table. It took the apocalypse to turn Fox Mulder into a pragmatist.

One night it’s just him and Byers left awake. They’re both silent for a while, watching the candle flicker. Mulder’s hand starts to throb. Scully’s been changing the bandages and applying various medicines two or three times a day. He doesn’t look at her face while she works. Her grimace unsettles him. It isn’t healing, but he doesn’t ask her about it. He can’t decide which is worse: the answer, or the thought of forcing her to say it out loud.

It’s the same arm he almost lost in Russia. For some reason that comforts him. He got a twenty-year loan and now the universe has come to collect.

“I never asked you about Langley,” Mulder says. Anything to distract him from the pain in his hand.

Byers’s gaze is fixed on the candle. “Don’t,” he advises.

Mulder looks away. They’ve been better than brothers to him, these three men, for decades now. He should have asked months ago. So many things have fallen by the wayside. When is the last time anyone said Matthew’s name, or Maggie’s? The cold and the hunger and the fucking unbearable pain in his hand, they’re all powerful distractions. He tells himself it’s for the best.

After a while Byers says, “It was fast,” and Mulder nods; he understands. _Fast_ is something to be grateful for.


	19. before

Once, when she was very young, she put a rabbit in a lunchbox to hide it from her brother.

She has told herself this story a thousand times since she was a little girl. The rabbit was hers and Melissa’s, at least in theory; Missy lost interest after a few days, and then it was Dana’s. Her own pet. Something she didn’t have to share. Something that belonged to her, that lived and breathed because Dana fed it and gave it water. She just named it “Rabbit”, though her mother encouraged her to give it “a better name, dear.” But Dana insisted.

Sometimes she’d let Rabbit out of his cage to run around in her and Missy’s bedroom. One day Dana was letting Rabbit play on the carpet when Missy opened the door without knocking, and Rabbit escaped into the hallway.

Dana spent an hour looking for Rabbit, but he was too good at hiding. It wasn’t until Bill got home from baseball practice that she realized what Rabbit had done.

Bill went on a rampage, screaming about how all of his favorite clothes were _ruined_ and covered in rabbit pee, and Dana wanted to yell at him that it was his fault for leaving his clothes all over the floor, but she was too scared. Instead she went back and checked all of Rabbit’s hiding places until she finally found him, quivering in the space between her nightstand and the wall. Carefully Dana scooped him out and put him in the lunchbox and put the lunchbox in the basement.

And then, and then.

In the story she tells herself, she found Rabbit days later, dead and crawling with maggots. She cried and cried and Missy and Bill felt sorry for her and helped her bury the lunchbox in the backyard.

She remembers it. She remembers the tears hot on her face, remembers Bill digging the hole with a garden trowel, remembers him hugging her and apologizing for getting so mad. She has told herself the story so many times that she can picture it more clearly than any of her real memories. She was so very young.

And of course, none of that is how it happened.

Rabbit was hers. That much is true. But she let Rabbit into Bill’s room on purpose, to get back at him; she knew Rabbit would destroy things and she knew that Bill would come after her. And when she put Rabbit in the lunchbox, didn’t she know what was going to happen?

Didn’t she?

And when she found Rabbit she didn’t cry, and so no one came to comfort her. But she took a pair of tweezers and a paring knife, and when she was done investigating she buried the box herself in the backyard, in the shallow grave that was all her small hands could manage.

But that’s not how she chooses to remember it.


	20. after

The snow melts suddenly, overnight. It’s January and the thermometer climbs to sixty-five degrees, unheard of even in Virginia’s mild winters.

Skinner leaves that morning on a bike he takes from the McNallys’ shed. Lockport is gone, but with the roads clear he can make it to the next town, some twenty miles west of the little house. Will doesn’t ask to go, still shaken by what he saw last time.

Scully knows that what happened to Will happens every day – has happened to thousands of children every day, for all of human history. She knows. In times of war, of disease and disaster, children see their homes destroyed. And Will – Will is hardly a child anymore. But it is impossible to walk away from it unchanged.

In the early afternoon Skinner returns with blood soaking the right leg of his jeans and in his hands, a – she doesn’t want to call it a _newspaper_ , because it has no real analogue in the old world – but _news_ , at least, from the outside. A single page of carbon-copy paper, neatly handwritten, and Scully wonders how many people spent hours copying the same information, pressing hard with their ballpoint pens, checking the transfer.

They take turns reading it, Skinner’s lips in a thin line and his hands shaking. Scully has always thought of the older man as an imposing physical presence, broad and strong, filling up every room he walks into. But Skinner, like the rest of them, is reduced. He looks older, thinner. Gray. The color started leaching from their lives when the snow came. She doesn’t expect it to come back.

When it’s her turn she uses her finger to underline the words and tries to imagine who wrote them. The handwriting is round and neat, feminine, she thinks, though she’s no handwriting analyst. Something about it looks young, too, like she’s only a year or two separated from dotting all her “I"s with hearts. She might be Will’s age, Scully thinks. Maybe she used to go to his high school.

All of the news is bad, but none of it is a surprise. Much of it echoes what Skinner told them all those months ago, when he first arrived: that the major cities are gone, that people who survived the attacks and the first wave of illness are being rounded up and sent to what are, officially, refugee camps. Entire towns disappear at once, and no one understands how.

When Scully glances up, Will is staring at her. The lights. She doesn’t have any proof that they took Lockport the night she and Will went onto the ice. She doesn’t have any proof, but she still _knows_ , and she remembers when she used to be a skeptic.

The paper also contains a report from a man who was taken from Carroll Station and then escaped from the camp. He says that tests are being conducted on the survivors.

And the paper says that things in the natural world are changing. The wood with that unbearable burning smell: it’s not just them, it’s not just here. Animals behaving strangely, then dying off in waves. Fresh meat that makes people violently ill. Layers of white ash settling over fields, with no fire in sight.

"They had a list,” Skinner says, once they’ve all seen the paper. “I checked the names, but.” His voice trails off. No one says anything; no news is no news. Mulder puts his good arm around Will’s shoulders and hugs him close, and for once Will doesn’t object.

After she pulls Skinner into the kitchen and tells him to take off his pants. He raises an eyebrow and deadpans, “I thought you’d never ask,” and somehow she finds that comforting.

There’s a round red cut on his shin, easily six inches in diameter, halfway between his ankle and his knee. Scully kneels down to get a better look. “This is a bite mark,” she says.

“Yeah,” Skinner says, grimacing as she touches the edges of the cut. “One of those dogs. Thing acted rabid.”

She grabs a cloth and some disinfectant and starts cleaning it out. Blood oozes slowly from the wound.

It’s easier to ask when she doesn’t have to look him in the eye. “How long do we have?”

Skinner winces, whether at the question or the disinfectant she’s not sure. “I don’t know what you mean,” he lies.

She presses the cloth fully against his wound, letting him feel the sting everywhere at once. Skinner gasps. “ _Jesus_ , Scully. ‘Do no harm’, remember?”

“I’m out of alternatives. Tell me.”

“It’s happening faster than I expected,” he admits. He glances toward the living room, but no one is eavesdropping at the door. “We thought it would take a few years, at least.”

“Remaking an entire planet? I’d think so.”

Skinner leans his back against the refrigerator and stares down at her. “It won’t help,” he says, nodding toward the door. “Telling them.”

“Then what?” she asks, trying not to sound desperate.

“I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ll try to get back to base. If it’s still there, then maybe. I’ll send word back once I know, either way, and if everything’s all right I’ll send someone to get you. You’ll just have to lay low until then.” He swallows. “It’s not too late.”

“Mulder’s hand,” she says, and then stops.

“Yeah. I know. And maybe this leg.” He points at the bite mark, a more livid red than it was five minutes ago, then shrugs like it doesn’t matter to him at all. “I didn’t mean it’s not too late for us, Dana.” His voice is softer than she ever remembers it being. “I meant it’s not too late to make it matter.”


	21. after

Scully unwraps the bandage. They’d run out of sterile bandages a couple of days ago and now she’s using strips of his old undershirts that she bleached and dried, but they are going through so many of them, and they only had so many old T-shirts.

His arm looks worse every time she checks it. It’s not healing. The infection is burrowing deeper, and while it’s not whatever that first disease was, it can’t be anything good.

The old bandages get tossed into a bucket and she’ll bury them later. For now Mulder averts his eyes. He’s barely looked at his hand since it happened, and she doesn’t want to force him.

They are only postponing the inevitable.

_One more day,_ she tells herself. One more day with both of his arms to wrap around her at night, one more day with both of his hands on her face. She tells herself that it’s not spreading up his arm anymore. It’s fine to wait.

He interrupts her. “It’s not getting better,” he says.

She forces herself to meet his gaze. His eyes are almost gold in the afternoon light. She tries to say something, tries to tell him, but in the end she can’t get the words out. She just shakes her head, biting her lip to keep herself from crying. _You’re a doctor. Be a doctor._

She is so, so selfish.

“I trust you,” he says, and she closes her eyes.

“I think…” She stops, licks her lips. “I think we can save the joint.”

“Okay,” he says quietly.

From his knuckles halfway up his forearm it’s red and raw. Just like her, just like all of them, Mulder is meat and bone. She remembers that she used to believe in God.

Scully touches him, the backs of her fingers smoothing the crease in his brow, the tension in his jaw. She doesn’t ask him if his hand hurts; the pain is written in every line on his face. She doesn’t know what makes her say it. “You know, I never meant to fall in love with you.”

“Thanks,” he says dryly, but still he turns to press a kiss to her fingers as they trail across his cheek.

“That’s not what I meant.” She swallows. “I couldn’t help myself. I was always good at…at shutting down emotion. At closing off. But you.”

He’s staring at her. Self-conscious, she starts to wrap his hand back up, but he stops her.

“It’s okay,” he says again, and that’s how she knows it’s bad. Mulder is always frenetic, always fighting; Mulder has never sat quietly back and accepted _anything_. “I give you a lot of credit, Scully.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’ve spent twenty-five years trying to stop me from touching evidence with my bare hands,” he says, and she doesn’t add, _and smelling it, and tasting it_. “And you haven’t even said I told you so.”

She lets out a short laugh. She leans forward to press her forehead to his. “I can say it now, if you want.”

“I think it would make me feel better.”

“I told you so,” she whispers, but he kisses her before she gets the last word out. He still tastes like Mulder, all passion and heat and rash decisions. She sighs against his lips and tangles her fingers in his hair, gone half-silver now.

When they break apart she re-wraps his bandage in earnest. Her fingers tremble, touching him. His arm. His left hand that never wore a ring, all of these years. This is the least of all the things they’ve lost and are losing, but it still stings.

He watches her work. Her careful, cautious fingers. Roughly he says, “I’ve loved you the whole time,” and she pins the bandage in place and crawls into his lap, pressing her face into the crook of his neck and whispering, “Me too.”

* * *

 

_I thought I saw them again last night_   
_those same distant headlights_   
_sweeping back and forth across_   
_the empty shells of the summer homes_

_and if the bastards ever come_   
_promise me you’ll take the kids and run_   
_I may be weak and I may be frail_   
_but I can throw them off your trail_

—Quiet Hollers, [Mont Blanc](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fquiethollers.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fmont-blanc&t=ZWFiNWFmNmI3ZmNkNDAyOGNhOTc5NzM0MzliNjQzNTZjYmQ1MmNlNSxFNUZ2NEFOTA%3D%3D&b=t%3AbkEJOfCBPwl9RzxGvC2jjQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fall-these-ghosts.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F158803217623%2Finterlude&m=1)

* * *

 

She’s always been thin, and over the years she’d honed her body into a perfectly efficient machine, all lithe muscle with just enough extra. Now he holds her at night and could count every bone in her body.

He tries not to, though.

On the couch in his office she’s been asleep for hours, but Mulder doesn’t sleep much anymore. He traces circles on her hip with the fingertips of his left hand. The pain has dulled to a low, constant ache; he doesn’t know if that’s good or bad. Mulder’s not worried about what it will be like, after. He knows how to live with a phantom limb.

The lights again, out over the lake.

“Scully,” he says, and even though it’s the middle of the night she must have been awake, because she doesn’t start at the sound of her name, just turns to look at him.

She says, her voice low, “The lights.”

“If they come for us,” he says, but she kisses him hard.

“Don’t.”

“Scully.”

More forcefully: “ _Don’t_.”

“You should go,” he says, and in his mind’s eye he sees it, the headlights closing in, the wind and the sparks and the screaming. Scully and Will carried away like everyone else they used to know. Disappearing beyond his reach. “Before it’s too late. Take Will and go.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” she says, but he hears the uncertainty in her voice and it only makes him more sure.

“I’ll hold them off as long as I can. Create a diversion, I’ll – you take the truck and whatever’s left of the gasoline.” He can feel his grip on her tightening as he adds, “Will knows how to shoot.”

“Oh my God,” she exhales.

“You know they want him. And they know where we are.”

“We don’t know _anything_. God, Mulder, what are you saying?”

“Promise me,” he says.

“Never,” she says, fierce. “Not without you.”

But she’ll run. He will make sure of it; he will not lose her to this. This world, just like the old one, needs to have Scully in it. He thinks of the bags he packed for her and Will, all those months ago. The handgun and rifle they keep loaded near the door, and Scully’s first-aid kit carrying unspeakable things.

He holds her closer; he counts the minutes. He watches the headlights swim through the window again, then fade into the darkness.

For now.

* * *

 

_**FOUND** _

_**** _


	22. after

It happens fast.

Scully’s on the couch writing in her notebook and Mulder is opening a can of beans they’ll split three ways and Will is somewhere doing something, when Mulder cries out from the kitchen.

She drops the notebook and crosses into the other room. “Mulder?” she asks, assuming he’s dropped something or tripped or some other normal—

But he’s standing in the middle of the kitchen staring at his left arm, holding it away from his body. The bandage is soaked through with some viscous black liquid, and as she watches in horror, the liquid starts dripping down onto the floor. It sizzles when it hits the ground.

“Oh my God,” she says.

“Get it off,” he says. “God, Scully, _get it off_ me!” His entire body starts to tremble, his pupils dilate, and fifteen minutes ago he was fine—

_Inhale_ , she tells herself. Close your eyes. This is someone else, a stranger, a patient. You’ll fix this. It’s your job.

Swiftly she clears everything off the kitchen table. It’s old but it’s solid wood and heavy; it’ll hold his weight. “Here,” she tells him, and when she puts her arm around his waist he nearly collapses onto her. She half-guides, half-carries him to the table, then helps him climb up and lie down.

“Scully,” he says. He lets his left arm hang off the table and looks away, like if he can’t see it, it isn’t happening.

Through gritted teeth she says, “It’s gonna be okay.”

And Will’s hovering in the doorway again. He’s been a shadow around the house for weeks and weeks but he looks stronger now; there’s a warmth in his cheeks that’s been absent. His eyes dart between his father shuddering on the table and Scully holding him and he says, “Mom, what's—”

“Stay with him,” Scully says, hating the tremor in her voice. “I have to go out to the shed.” All the things she had collected when they’d gone out to look for Matt. All the things she’d hoped she would never need to use.

Will nods and Scully goes out. The sun is bright and hot, it feels more like May than January, but that is the least of her problems.

When she comes back inside Will is standing over the table, where Mulder is shaking ever more violently. Will has his hands on his father’s shoulders, holding him down, keeping him from falling.

Her son looks at her over his shoulder, his face pale and afraid. “Jesus, Mom. Why didn’t you do something sooner?”

Scully just shakes her head, the box of supplies heavy in her arms. She doesn’t have a good answer. “I thought the antibiotics would help,” she says, and all her other excuses spill out, one after another. “I thought it would stop spreading, or just get better on its own, or—”

“It’s gotten so much worse. Didn’t you _notice_?”

“Will,” she says, and on the table Mulder thrashes his head and his eyes are closed and she Is sure he’s barely conscious. She whispers anyway: “I didn’t know if he’d survive it.”

For a long minute he just stares at her. And then finally he says, “But you’re a _doctor_.”

“And this isn’t an operating room,” she snaps. “This is a kitchen that hasn’t been cleaned in months. This is a box full of supplies I scavenged from a vet clinic. And your father is – he’s been on starvation rations for weeks, and I don’t know what else the infection has done, and he’s weak already and—” She stops abruptly. She refuses to say the rest.

Her hands shaking, she sets the box down on the counter and opens it, sifting through its contents. Local anesthetic, syringes still in their packaging. She’d thank God for small favors, but right now she’s in the market for some bigger ones.

And Will says, “What about me?”

Scalpel still in her hands, Scully turns. “What about you?”

“My blood,” Will says, and she still doesn’t understand and they don’t have time for this, but he keeps talking. “I – it didn’t affect me. I touched it, too.”

She stares at him. “You didn’t say anything.”

“I didn’t want to. I was afraid you would think that I was some kind of – that I…” His voice trails off, but she understands. Hasn’t she wondered the same thing?

“So let me try,” Will says finally.

“Try what?”

“Do you believe I have powers? That I can do things other people can’t?” His blue eyes are a challenge, locked on hers. All her years of skepticism, all her years of searching for the rational answer.

But she wants to believe. And Will has always been miraculous.

Slowly, she nods.

“Then I think I can…” He pushes his hands through his hair, frustrated. “I don’t know how to explain it, exactly, but I think I can move the infection out. When I was touching him I could feel them – the cells that are wrong. They’re mostly in his arm but there’s some further up, in his shoulder, and right now they have nowhere to go. But I think that if – that if you did it, I could get them out.” Will’s breathing is rapid and loud, his cheeks flushed again. “And if there’s a way to give him some of my blood, you should do it. I think that will help.” He pauses, then says it again, louder. “It’ll help.”

What he’s saying is impossible. “Will—”

“I’m stronger than him.” He licks his lips. “Whatever this is, whatever’s been happening, I feel better than I have in a long time. And I know it sounds crazy, but you have to trust me. Mom. You have to let me help.”

Mulder groans. On the floor the black liquid congeals in a puddle, and this is not the time for careful, slow decisions.

And she needs some hope to cling to. And there is nothing left to lose.

So Scully nods at Will, and he gives her a weak smile. “It’s gonna be okay,” he says to her, and he sounds so sure.

She leans over the table, running her thumb along Mulder’s jaw. She says his name, and when he blinks at her his eyes are hazy. “Mulder, I need you to stay with me.”

For just a second, the clouds clear from his eyes, and they are as sharp and as green as they’ve ever been. “We’ve got you,” Scully says.

Mulder’s eyes close again, his head falling to the side. She says it again, mostly to herself. “We’ve got you.”

* * *

 

One hand on his dad’s left shoulder, the other at his elbow. Will’s eyes are closed and he knows it’s working. His blood cells are pushing the infection out. It’s all weirdly literal: when Will is working the stuff dripping from his dad’s arm is almost black; when he loses focus, it’s thin and bright red, normal blood again.

Will understands this, too: whatever he is made of, it’s not so different from the infection. The cells feel almost the same to him, as he moves them. They are fighting fire with fire. Where his mom drew his blood, at the crook of his left elbow, there is the disquieting sensation of wetness, a constant trickle from a pinprick wound.

His mom is just next to him and sometimes their arms brush as she reaches for a tool or moves to get a different angle. There must be sounds, but all Will hears is his dad’s raspy breathing and the blood rushing through his veins. Will reaches in to push the black out. He can’t control his dad’s cells at all, can’t do anything to stop the bleeding. _That’s not your job_ , he reminds himself, and even with his eyes closed he knows his mom’s hands are at work.

They’re going to save him. Will feels a bright burst of pride. All of the weird shit he’s been able to do, all of the time he’s spent wondering where he really came from and who he really is. Maybe it really is worth something. Maybe he really is worth something.

“I need to sew things up, Will,” his mom says, her voice breaking his concentration. “Are you ready?”

Will re-focuses, seeking out the bad cells again, but they’re mostly gone. He catches one last clump just at the edges and _pushes_ it out; hears one last drip as it hits the floor. “Yes,” he says, and he feels his mother gently pushing him back from the table. He collapses into the kitchen chair and doesn’t watch.

When he hears his mother sit down next to him, he finally opens his eyes.

His dad is lying still on the kitchen table, his skin pale and blotchy and his left arm gone just below the elbow. His chest rises and falls, steady, and his lungs sound clear. “He’ll be okay,” Will says.

“We’ll find out,” his mom says, but the relief in her eyes is as good as a confirmation.

“Maybe Skinner was right,” Will says.

Exhausted, she still corrects him. “Mr. Skinner.”

Will rolls his eyes and insists, “My blood helped. I mean, I did some of it too, but my cells were fighting back, it was working. We have to go back out there, Mom. If I can help. If it’ll really work.”

Settling back in her chair, she looks away from him. After a moment she says, “I have a computer chip in my neck.”

Will cocks his head, questioning. It’s a strange non-sequitur, and anyway what the hell does that mean?

She continues, “Years ago, when I had cancer.”

He knows about this, kind of. Grandma got teary about it once, years ago; his dad got tight-lipped and anxious whenever it came up.

“I thought I was going to die.” His mother stares straight ahead at the wall. She says it like it’s nothing, the same way she used to say _We’re having salmon for dinner_. “There was nothing left to try. But Mulder wouldn’t give up. He came across a vial with a computer chip, and a man – a man we knew said it would cure me.”

Will is sure that this depiction of events elides a great deal, but he doesn’t interrupt her.

“And it did, I guess.” Her forehead creases. “Maybe. It’s impossible to know, really. If it was the chip, or if one of the treatments finally worked, or – or sometimes these things just happen, the body finds some reserve of strength and fights back, and we call it a miracle.” Finally she looks at him.

Will reaches out and runs his index finger over the back of her neck. He can feel it there just under the skin, hard and square. He wonders how he never noticed it before.

His mom says, “We’ll never know for sure.”

Will is startled to find that he has his own reserves of strength, and that he knows what he believes. “You left it there, though. You never took it out.”

Their eyes meet. On the kitchen table Will’s dad breathes in and out, and for a moment it’s the only sound in the world.

“No,” she says softly. “I didn’t.”

* * *

 

Mulder had passed out almost the second Will had put his hands on him. Now Will’s asleep, too, his head leaning awkwardly against the back of the kitchen chair. She watches them both. She thinks about miracles, and wonders if she’s finally used all of hers up.

It’s long past sunset when Mulder finally wakes up. He does it slowly, stretching his feet out and blinking into the darkness before he turns his head to her.

“What happened?” he asks, slurring the words.

“I don’t know,” she says honestly. She gets up and stands over him, pressing her hand to his forehead, the side of his neck. His fever’s gone down. His pulse is somewhere on the high side of normal, but that’s to be expected, considering he just underwent major surgery on a kitchen table with local (and perhaps psychic) anesthetic.

He seems fine. She can’t stop touching him, just to make sure.

Mulder nods, then yawns, bringing his head back to center. She should get him a pillow, but she’s not ready to leave him alone yet.

“I saved you,” he says to the ceiling, half-delirious. “Scully, remember?”

Scully doesn’t bother asking him which of the five hundred occasions he’s thinking of; it hardly matters. She just chokes out a laugh and rests her head on his chest, where his heart is still beating. “Yeah,” she says. “You did.”


	23. after

Those lights again over the lake, for the third night in a row. Scully and Will are asleep in the basement, but Mulder can’t sleep, not with the lights. He doesn’t even need to see them arcing in through the basement window, swears he can feel them in his bones.

He knows he shouldn’t go outside – if there are lights, it means they’re looking for someone, and who else is left? – but he wants to do this one thing. There’s so little else any of them can do.

With one hand Mulder pushes a spade into the hard winter earth. In a different world he’d have stepped on it for the leverage, but if he breaks this spade there’s no buying a new one.

The snow is gone but its memory remains; ice crystals in the dirt just six inches below the surface. This seems improbable. The temperature hasn’t dropped below fifty degrees in weeks.

Of course, this is not the most improbable thing that has happened. And the earth has a very long memory.

The vegetables are rotting in the ground. They couldn’t have eaten them anyway, but it stings all the same. Long afternoons bent to the soil, dirt under their fingernails. After so many years hiding in the basement of the Hoover building, Mulder was inordinately proud of his farmer’s tan. Now all of his work has come to nothing: manuscripts untouched for months in his desk drawer, his file cabinet still full of mysteries they’ll never solve, and a garden full of decay.

Mulder thinks about poisoning the soil, about leaving behind one big _fuck you_ to his land’s next inhabitants, but he doesn’t have sufficient information. What they’re made of, these trespassers, the colonists; what would hurt them. For all he knows they eat rat poison for dinner, and anyway Mulder doesn’t have any particular desire to turn rats into collateral damage. It’s hard enough to survive.

Instead, he finishes digging up the potatoes and carrots and piles them near the shed; all of this takes longer now, like most things, but he’s getting used to it. He takes a packet of seeds from his pocket and tucks them into the dirt, almost tenderly. The seeds disappear into the earth. There’s no reason to do this, or anything else, except that after everything you just keep going.

When he’s done, the moon is high and bright overhead. He imagines the land will remember him.

* * *

 

They don’t hear from Skinner or anyone else.

The world gets quieter, and quieter.

The quiet, and the dark, and the headlights.

Circling.

* * *

 

Scully makes a list of the dead and of the living.

She makes a list and she writes it by candlelight on the walls of the basement, because even if the house gets destroyed, the foundation is strong. An archaeologist from some other planet will find it and know that she was here, that it mattered, that all of these names were remembered by someone.

She writes her mother’s name first, with shaking hands. Beneath it she writes _Richard Langly_. She writes _Mindy Rogalski_ and next to her name Scully writes _Timothy Rogalski_. _Evan Rogalski_. _Micah Rogalski_. She writes names that Mindy gave her, other friends and neighbors, _Kathleen Hardesty_ , _Jacob Parrish_ , _Lindsey Walsh_. The girl Will took to the homecoming dance last year, who died just a week after the attacks when she was shot by a neighbor, a mistake: _Louisa Chung_ , and her parents, who’d taken approximately five hundred pictures of Will and Louisa all dressed up, who died of an infection a few weeks later: _Kelly Stevenson-Chung_ , _Alan Chung_. What Scully would give for those photos now. The names of all five McNallys. She doesn’t write _Matthew Scully_ anywhere. She left his name behind in every surviving town they passed through in Kentucky.

She writes _Lockport, Carroll Station, Mount Olivet, Claysville_. Within the name of every town there are hundreds, thousands more names, but she doesn’t know them all. Once she would have said that God knew all their names, but she doesn’t think like that anymore. If she doesn’t remember them, maybe no one will.

On another wall she writes _Walter Skinner, Melvin Frohike, John Fitzgerald Byers, Dana Scully_. _William Scully III. Fox Mulder_. She begs the future not to make her a liar.

It is almost time to go.

* * *

 

After he’s done packing their bags and stashing them next to the front door, Mulder takes a few things out of Scully’s first aid kit. He saves them for himself.


	24. before

Once, when he was five or six years old, Will woke panting from a nightmare. The digital clock next to his bed blinked _2:17_ in bright red letters, so he knew his parents were asleep. Usually – every other time, in fact – Will woke them anyway, but not tonight.

Like his father, Will was prone to nightmares. He always remembered them perfectly, maybe because they were just like movies: his nightmares always had a discernible beginning and middle (and end, if he didn’t wake up first). The scenes and characters were drawn in incredible detail. If anyone asked, Will could count the number of leaves on the trees or bricks in the walls; he could find crayons that precisely matched the color of a dead man’s skin, two or three or ten days after his death.

Of course, no one ever asked.

Usually Will would pad down the hallway to his parents’ room and clamber into bed with them. They would wake up and he’d tell them the broad strokes of his nightmare – he knew already that he wasn’t supposed to remember them so clearly – and they would reassure him.

Will’s parents weren’t like most parents. He knew from TV and the reports of his friends at school that parents were supposed to tell you that there’s no monster under your bed, that zombies aren’t real, that aliens aren’t going to take you away in their shiny silver spaceships. Will’s parents never, ever said those things. “We’ll keep the bad things from you,” his mother would say, and she’d press a kiss to the top of his head, mussing up his hair. And she or his father would tell him a story, with the more gruesome details left out, of a time, long ago, when they fought monsters every day, when they protected people every day. And Will knew that they would protect him, too.

In later years, he’ll realize that those late-night conversations were the most his parents ever told him about their work.

That night, the night he didn’t wake his parents, he dreamed that he was the hero of the story. He dreamed that something terrible had happened and everyone was gone; he dreamed that he was the only one who could save them. In his dream he was afraid and alone, but also powerful. He dreamed of a little house in the middle of nowhere and the lake shining behind it, candlelight in the basement, and his parents’ familiar voices. _I’d move heaven and earth to keep you safe_ , his mom said in the dream. _Heaven and earth_. He didn’t understand what any of it meant, and unlike his other dreams he would forget all of it by the morning. Years later he’d recall pieces of it, just fragments, but enough to understand what had happened, and what was going to happen.

Once, a long time ago, Will slept, and dreamed of the world to come.


	25. found




	26. after

At some point in the long night he’d dozed off on the couch, but he’s awakened by the same lights.

Closer.

For days they’ve been circling the lake further out, past where Lockport used to be. Now they’re almost overhead, glaring down on the roof of a deserted house just a half-mile down the road.

And then he hears the engines. He remembers the last time, that endless scream, the ice cracking under their feet. It won’t happen again.

He takes the stairs to the basement two at a time and crouches beside Scully’s mattress.

“They’re coming,” he says, his voice hoarse with sleep. “Scully. Scully.” He shakes her hard and she blinks at him, then comes suddenly awake.

“Mulder—“

“You have to go,” he says. “It’s time.”

She moves through the shadows to where Will is sleeping. He hears her whispering, hears the mattress squeaking as she kneels on it.

And then she turns to him. “He’s gone,” she breathes.

Without a second’s hesitation Mulder runs upstairs to the back room, searching the horizon for his son’s silhouette. He’s not there, he’s not anywhere – and the bag Mulder packed for him is gone.

“Where did he go?” Scully from behind him, somewhere near the front door. “Mulder, _where did he go_?”

He’s shaking his head, trying to clear it. It’s impossible. There must have been some sign, something that happened over the last days or weeks, some clue. But he can’t remember, not _anything_. The last conversation he had with his son was about how sick they both were of black beans. _Please don’t let that be the last thing I said to my son_ , Mulder thinks, desperate, and he doesn’t know who he’s praying to.

Her voice is barely a whisper. “He took your gun.”

“I didn’t hear him leave,” Mulder says. His voice seems to echo in the empty house, in the dark. He’s turning over couch cushions and pulling books off the shelves when he sees it: a page from Scully’s notebook, torn out and tucked underneath a glass of water on the coffee table. He yanks it out, collapsing to the couch as he squints to read it in the dark.

“What the fuck,” he says, disbelieving.

Scully takes it from his hands. Her blue eyes bright, exactly the same shade as Will’s, as she scans the letter. It doesn’t take long. Will didn’t bother to write much.

Mulder had run away from home once, when he was around Will’s age. In his backpack he’d stuffed two pairs of jeans, five t-shirts, and not nearly enough underwear; he put his dog-eared copy of _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ and a picture of his sister in the front pocket. He’d made it as far as the ferry terminal, where a bunch of his neighbors pleasantly inquired where he was going, with a clear undercurrent of _because we’ll tell your parents if we need to_. So instead he snuck through his best friend’s bedroom window and spent the night on her floor.

Now, all these years later, he remembers his mother’s face when he came back the next morning. Mascara smudged around her bloodshot eyes; crescent moons on her palms from twelve hours clenching her fists. She thought she had lost him, too. He hadn’t even left a note.

Mulder finally believes in karma.

“It’s the middle of the night. He can’t have gotten far.” Scully says it with such confidence that Mulder almost believes her. “We can catch up to him. We can take the bikes, they won’t make any more noise than we will on foot.”

But Mulder doesn’t move. Scully puts the note back down on the table. She says, “Come on.”

He’s sitting on the edge of the couch, feet flat on the floor in front of him. He rests his head on his hand.

“Mulder.”

“I told you,” he says, his voice muffled.

“That’s bullshit, Mulder. You know I can’t let you—“

“It’s not up to you.” He looks up at her then. “They’re _here_ , Scully. It’s too late. If we run, they’ll catch us.”

She says his name again, one more time, and her voice breaks on the second syllable. He stands and gathers her to him, his chin on the top of her head.

“Let me keep you safe,” he whispers, jaw gritted, and it sounds like begging. “You have to find him. He’s alone, Scully. I can hold them off. You have to go. You have to.”

He _is_ begging. He’s not better than that, has never been better than that.

Scully shudders. Against the fabric of his shirt she whispers, “I didn’t want it to end like this.”

“I know.” He pulls away just far enough to kiss her, just once. “It’ll be okay, Scully.”

The sound of engines, getting closer.

“You have to go,” he says. “Find Will. Find Skinner. I’ll follow you when it’s safe.”

Her eyes are shining and they both know he’s a liar. He takes her bag from the door and feels for the weight of her pistol inside, the extra ammunition he packed. He hopes Will took some, too, but there’s nothing he can do about that now. She puts the backpack on and it dwarfs her frame.

Scully, who has always been made of steel and lately she’s tempered herself into a weapon, and he loves her and loves her and she is so brave and if this is the last time he ever sees her, he’ll remember this.

“I love you,” she says.

The lights sweep through the room, across the planes of her face. He is not afraid.

He says, “ _Run_.”


	27. later

She will write all of it down; she will remember, she will remember.

_One night, when they were young, she fell asleep sprawled across the full-size bed in his motel room._

She is going to find the narrative again. The story isn’t over, not yet.

_I don’t think it’s going to happen fast._

Not yet.


End file.
